There’s a couple of notes and observations I’ve had churning around in my head for a few days now that I want to write down before I forget.

Firstly, upon talking to my friends here in Singapore, I learnt about the term “FIRE”, which stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early”. I’ve never heard of it back home, it seems to be some sort of.. local slang(?) that means to skimp and save up and invest to aim for an early retirement. But it’s prevalent enough and ingrained enough into the local speak that even a quick Google search shows many local bank websites talking about it. And there was some discussion about a couple members of our cohort who have basically already managed to achieve it one way or another. I thought it was an interesting look at how money-focused Singapore’s society tends to be, especially since it’s an extremely expensive place to live in.

Conversely, since I’m waiting to buy a house back home in Edmonton, I don’t have all that much money and none of that is really being invested right now heh. Though I am paying into the Canada Pension Plan automatically from my work, that’s about it right now from me… and it’s not likely to change unless I *don’t* end up buying a house for whatever reason. Hm.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that there are chickens basically everywhere now, but what happened to the stray cats? I haven’t seen a single stray cat all trip, whereas my previous travel diaries to Singapore have usually featured a number of them. I don’t expect to see them around Dhoby Ghaut/Somerset/Orchard Road, but I’ve been surprised that I haven’t ran into any of them at all while wandering the heartlands and HDB blocks.

Oh well. In today’s travel log, I started off the day visiting a nearby Singapore Post store, not to send a box back to Singapore (yet) but to scout out the process. I ended up with this monstrosity of a sheet:

I do understand the process more or less, and the Singapore Post branches have all the materials I need to build the box and pack the items in them. More or less. However, when I actually step through the process, the slow economy shipping option doesn’t actually turn up and Gemini pointed me to this page (local) where it said its suspended after all. Yikes. The other options are too quick and too expensive though, so maybe I should just drag the stuff along with me and cull some of the lousier papers I have to save weight. A lot of the weight I have came from Japan too, I got more paper ephemera there in four days than I have from Singapore in the eight days since, though the numbers are now pretty close.

Anyway for now that was a problem for another day. My plan today was, as always, to walk around and explore new places. I took the local train from Orchard to Novena MRT Station, two stops north, and walked out into an attached mall there called Square 2. It wasn’t my target for the day and I didn’t spend any time in there at all, but I did take a picture anyway.

My target was the Balestier Road area, which was north and east of the train station. The weather was pretty hot, though it drizzled a little as well, and I tried to stick to the overpasses between the medical buildings and hospital there before venturing out onto the streets when I had to. I did pass this little gem of a house though:

Thankfully I did not get ambushed by an attack chicken. Balestier Road, when I finally reached it, was architecturally neat to see, but the buildings looked old and tired and the outdoor (though shaded) eateries looked like they were desperately clinging on to life in the melting sun, with little foot traffic and run-down, cramped, and dirty buildings everywhere. That might have partially been influenced by the hot sun and pouring sweat making me beeline for an air-conditioned mall as soon as possible though.

The eatery I was headed for was in this building, Balestier Plaza:

Although it was a tall and interesting-looking building, only the bottom two levels were retail, the rest of it were some sort of apartment complex, I guess.

I headed to this eatery within the store, as it had been recommended for a nice, out of the way spot for my favourite dish, Fried Hokkien Mee. This eatery had a system where you’d scan a QR code once you sat down at a table, and then ordered and paid from that website, all without having to interact with the staff at all until it came time to pick up your food.

I picked the $10 deluxe dish and it was fast, tasty, and filling! Yum. Finally, a good Hokkien Mee dish.

I walked around the two storey retail complex after, but I didn’t find much here, although what I did find was this gem of a worksheet that had my Discord server pretty angry at some of the answers afterwards:

And also these essays posted on a glass window, which I wanted to preserve for the future:

And this nice model ship in a corner of the mall, not linked to any shop at all. I wonder what the story behind it is.

I left the plaza through the exit behind that ship, and made my way to another nearby mall called Shaw Plaza. This one looked more like a real mall:

Though for some reason it had that main atrium with regular escalators, and then a side hallway with longer escalators:

It also had one single shop downstairs on the carpark level, but it had recently been repossessed by management and was sitting empty. The upper levels of the mall were a bit quiet too, with the top floor in particular having a row of abandoned crane machines and arcade tables:

This picture doesn’t portray it well, but there was a terrace area on the third floor and I saw two adults holding up a pinata while kids took turns swinging at it. Once it broke, candy splashed out all over the floor and all the kids rushed in to pick as much of it up as possible. That’s what’s happening in this picture.

After I was done this mall, I left and continued walking east along Balestier Road. Crossing over an overhead bridge afforded me these shots:

This shop, which was basically integrated into the bus stop next to it, also caught my eye:

As did this pretty building facade:

And this building, which turned out to be a small mall and which I decided to step into as it looked architecturally weird.

it was a two level mall called Balestier Point that smelled heavily of incense everywhere inside.

it turned out that the reason for this was that one of the non-abandoned shops in the mall was actually a temple of sorts on the second level.

I thought that contrasted with the other major shop in the mall that was still open, a TCG card shop with expensive-looking sleeved cards perched on shelves around the room. One very traditional and one very modern shop. And everything else was bascially closed and/or dead.

I didn’t have a real goal at this point so after this mall, I just kept on walking, letting interesting sights dictate where I went. I took a picture of this ceremonial setup:

But I had no idea what was going on here. There was actually a sign in front of it too, which, due to the narrow width of the pavement, I had to take two separate shots of to be able to capture the entire sign.

I *still* had no idea what that was all about after reading the sign though. What.

I eventually turned off of Balestier Road into the Whampoa neighbourhood just north of it. A lazy rooster welcomed me with a cock-a-doodle-doo as I entered the neighbourhood, before running off once I got too near.

Here’s a nice community garden I passed:

And a hawker centre that caught my eye and drew me in:

I think this was more or less called the Whampoa Food Centre, though it stretched over a couple of buildings and the building number of each block was often appended to its name too. There were two buildings dedicated to food stalls, although one was almost completely closed at this time of day.

And there was one block dedicated to what looked like a dry and wet market, although that was also almost completely closed by this point.

I also went behind the market to take a picture of the contrast between some of the older, dirtier buildings and the shinier, newer, grander ones behind it.

I then returned to the market and had maybe my weirdest meal yet, Claypot Frog Porridge with Century Egg:

And to wash away the heat and exhaustion, while I was waiting for the porridge to be made, I ordered Sea Coconut Soursop from the snacks stall across from the porridge one:

Both were, ah, interesting. Honestly the frog didn’t taste like anything much at all, but it had a lot of weirdly shaped bones. And the soursop thing was ice kachang (kakigoori/shaved ice) with extra steps, some chewy ingredients I did not recognize at all, and a couple of weird, rounded black seeds that I had to spit out.

I headed in the general direction of Boon Keng MRT Station after this, which was in a southeasterly direction from where I was. I passed by a number of nice “heartlands” shopping areas, the kind of neighbourhood shopping area full of coffeeshops and sundries and other random things.

For some reason, a number of the shops here had hung their towels out to dry on clothing racks in front of their shops, something I hadn’t seen anywhere else:

And as I passed by a coffeeshop, I heard a group of aunties and uncles chanting “Gong Xi Fa Chai!” and then all standing up and digging into whatever festive dish they had ordered here:

Then, while passing a park, I saw this sculpture that made me do a double take at first as the food looked very real and there was a beetle or fly or something crawling over the food when I first glanced at it. It was all fake and part of the sculpture though, it turned out.

It was significantly cooler by this point and I winded my way below HDB blocks and past playgrounds like this one as the warm wind caressed my hair:

The path I took also had me following the side of the Whampoa River, which was less a river and more a canal with No Fishing signs everywhere. No pictures of that part of my trip exist though, though I trailed behind a teenage girl who was trying to figure out skateboarding as two adults walking behind her tried to give her tips.

Soon, I reached the Boon Keng MRT area, and a Bendemeer Shopping Mall located behind it.

This area turned out to be a covered shopping street, very much like the Japanese shopping arcades (shoutengai) and like the Bangkit Market that I had visited last week. But I think less well-known and less touristy. I had no idea this existed at all and stumbled upon it completely by blind luck, so I was pretty happy to see it.

I didn’t actually buy anything here though, as it was somewhat late and I was getting tired, but walking through it gave me plenty of good vibes.

I then took the train back to Dhoby Ghaut and walked home from there, taking a picture of the construction site that makes all the noise that apparently other residents who have stayed in my lodging complain about. For me though, it’s what caused me to get a discounted stay in this place, so I’m happy about that. I liked the fiery sunset backdrop set against the tall buildings behind the picture too. That tree in front, not so much, but it’s not like I could have asked it to move. Maybe it’s representative of the struggle between nature and mankind.

I also passed this store and noted that nearly everytime I’ve seen this store, the Da Shi Jia Big Prawn Mee one on the left of the dental centre, it’s been packed with a lineup stretching out the front door:

I’ve seen the curry puff place two stores over to the right get irritated with the customers “blocking” the front of the store and try to get them to split the line so as to leave space for their own (much fewer) customers to be able to get into the shop. I’ve seen this happen more than once in the week I’ve been here alone!

Lastly, I stopped by an NTUC Fairprice to buy a couple of teas and tea-adjacent things to bring back home to try today. These things (minus the bottle of tea which was on sale for $1):

There’s been a lot of neat Chinese New Year adjacent stuff that I’ve seen on sale but just haven’t bought, I’m not a very materialistic shopper in general I guess. Still no idea what to get my family though. I know Dad likes a bunch of belinjo crackers which probably won’t survive the trip home since I’m still early on in my journey, but I haven’t actually seen those on sale anywhere either. This three day extension on my stay in Singapore is weird. Instead of getting extra time to explore, it just feels like I’m having an extra-long day to prepare for my checkout. I actually need to spend a bunch of time tomorrow planning out the details of the China leg of my trip, too.