One thing that I neglected to mention in yesterday’s blog post was that when I arrived at the airport and was waiting for my ride, and when I was venturing out of my hotel at midnight to look for the travel adaptor, there was a distinct smell of smoke in the air, obviously from a distant forest fire of some kind, and I was worried that this was going to persist and make me sick with a sore throat and vocal loss again. I’ve already sorta paid my sick dues this trip, damn it. Thankfully though, by the time I stepped out this morning after a furious session of blog compilation, the smoke seemed to have dissipated and the air smelled like air again.

Another note that needs mentioning is that I got my room at this centrally-located residence for cheap, only slightly over $100 a night all in, because there was construction noise going on in a building site across the road and plenty of people in the recent comments reaching back a couple of years in their booking.com reviews had complained about this. The listing also clearly stated this, that there was construction noise through the morning and afternoon.

I had suspicions that I would be fine with this though, because I actually find distant construction noises nostalgic, it reminds me of when I was young and listening to distant whirring noises though the apartment window. This one, as I realized once it started at around 8 am, was not one of those specific nostalgic noises that I liked, but was also no real problem for me at all — there was a dragging and knocking sound I could hear now and then, but that seemed to be about it. And, while audible, it wasn’t like it was from happening outside my window or anything like that, so to me it wasn’t terribly loud. I suppose different people would react differently to that sort of thing though, depending on how aurally sensitive they were. Me with my one deaf ear? Very much daijoubu.

While chatting with Dad the night before, he had mentioned a store along Killiney Road, adjacent to the road where my hotel was located, that he had liked many years ago. It was probably gone now, he said, since that memory was over 30 years ago now, but they served really good kaya toast for breakfast and he would come here now and then for it. He said that the store was locally famous and everyone in the area who was around back then would have known about it. I plugged all that into Gemini, and asked it to try to locate the name of the store, and Gemini returned the name of Killiney Kopitiam (local), formerly known as Kheng Hoe Heng Coffeeshop, which can actually be seen in one of the pictures that I took last night (relinked below here), to the left of the open shop.

Not only were they still around, but they had more than 50 branches, apparently, although this one near me was still the flagship one. Dad wasn’t 100% sure, but agreed that it seemed right, so off I hopped down the road for some kaya toast for breakfast.

This was really good, if really little. But that was fine, since that just meant I had space to eat other food, elsewhere. The drink was an Ice Tea O — they had options like Ice Tea, Ice Tea C, and Ice Tea O, and I had heard of the weird kopitiams before but did not remember what letter meant what (local). C meant evaporated milk and a bit of sugar though, in this case, and it tasted nice. That meal cost $6.30 — $3.60 for the kaya toast and $2.70 for the Ice Tea O.

My plans for the day were to wander and visit lots of shopping malls and markets. Both the large and small, busy and deserted ones. That’s one of my favourite parts of Singapore, and it being the peak of the Chinese New Year festivities probably meant that I’d see a bunch of cool, ephemeral setups too. There were also a *lot* of train stations and little neighbourhoods around each one there did not exist (well, the stations did not) back when I lived in Singapore many years ago, and I wanted to put some time down towards exploring these side lines and far-flung areas too. And although Singapore was a much less paper-based society than Japan was, I still also framed all this as a sort of ongoing, endless treasure hunt for free paper ephemera that I could bring home and scan.

So off I went. My first stop was the train station, where I figured out that my transit card from two years ago still worked and still had a good amount of cash in it. Great. I took the train from Somerset MRT Station up to Orchard then swapped lines and went two stops down the Thomson-East Coast Line to Havelock. This was a station that was very near to where Dad used to live with Ah Ma, where he grew up in long ago days prior to when I was born, and while I didn’t walk the road where his apartment was (as those HDB blocks were long gone), I was aiming for a nearby famous market to have a look-see around.

But first, there was a mall next to Havelock MRT Station that I wandered into. This was called Concorde Shopping Centre, and even though it was connected to a hotel, it was almost completely dead in a way that reminded me of the Chitose Station Plaza/Chitose Station Hotel combo that I had just been at the last couple days. The hotel itself was probably fine, even great, like the one I was at, but the attached mall only had a few straggling stores that largely did not cater to hotel visitors at all or were looking for new ownership. Yet, I like this sort of liminal mall a lot, and there were good locations nearby for people to shop at anyway. Just not really within the actual mall itself.

Like, you know it’s not working out when the escalator from the second floor to the third floor looks like this:

It was cool, but there was nothing else to do there. Walking out of the building and wandering east and south, I saw this majestic building:

The Tan Boon Liat Building. Even in Singapore this sort of layered, HDB-style shop layout isn’t very common, and I gawked at all the signs from below for a bit. It’s not really the sort of layout conducive to wandering through though, but I enjoyed looking at it from below. I also eventually circled behind the building to capture the less sexy side of things, the spam of air-conditioning units needed to keep Singapore’s heat at bay!

It was something like 29-31°C most of the day but there was a gentle breeze and it was mostly cloudy instead of relentlessly sunny so it didn’t bother me much. Just sweat away all the food and the months of sedentary winter lifestyle. At the base of that building was a little eatery. Well, a two-storey building with two separate ones, but the bottom one caught my eye.

The reason was that sign on the left — it said that this Aisha Family Kitchen was shutting down on Feb 27 2026 and thanked customers for their patronage. Well, that meant I -had- to eat here!

Their food model was interesting – you could have plain rice for $1 or Nasi Lemak rice for $4, and then each additional helping you wanted to add to the meal was $2. And they had a ton on trays here plus a couple more pots of curry on the side. I asked the lady to give me the $1 rice, plus four servings of her choosing for a total of $9, and she smiled and gave me this:

This was really nice. Eggplant, begedil, curry fish, and curry vegetables. And a side of ephemeral loss that I didn’t personally have but felt from other longtime patrons. I wholeheartedly enjoyed it.

After eating, I continued on my walk and ended up at my target, the Tiong Bahru Market.

It was all dolled up for Chinese New Year, very cute.

I walked through the dry goods area of the market, browsing and enjoying the ambience and smelling all the medicinal and floral scents of an Asian market:

I ended up buying a cute shirt that was on sale for $8 from one of the random side shops too.

There was also a wet foods section of the market that was mostly closed down that I peeked at. And there was a hawker centre on the second floor as well, but I didn’t go there and eat because I had just eaten at Aisha’s! Instead, it was really crowded so I wandered along toward my next destination.

This next destination was Tiong Bahru Plaza, located next to the Tiong Bahru MRT Station west of the market. This one was a REIT mall, but not a very big or shiny one, and it still had some old-timey neighbourhood vibes that I enjoyed. There was also a Chinese New Year shop set up outside with lots of red goods for sale — I don’t know what they’re called or how much business thye get but they’re visually extremely red and they only pop up around Lunar New Year. This one was certainly not the only one that I saw today.

Inside, there were a whole bunch of franchise shops and an indoor food court on the third floor, and also some stalls set up down on the ground floor that looked like a fair of sorts.

I was in here to try to troubleshoot a problem with the tourist eSIM that I had bought yesterday — it came with a phone number, but I could not seem to get it to receive SMS messages, which are needed for to set up practically every other useful app in Singapore, like the SimplyGo one which I was trying to get to sync to my transit card so I could see usage on it and top it up from my phone. And the actual Singtel app that lets uses manage their eSIMs itself needed SMS authentication to get into it. But for some reason it wasn’t working.

There was a Singtel shop in the mall itself, but I had to take a digital ticket to wait for service, the queue for service was over an hour long, and the notification system for the queue itself required SMS too, in a very funny sort of circular logic. I then found out through Googling and finding a singular Reddit thread about it that the tourist eSIMS actually suck now because of “regulations” that mean that they no longer provide SMS and call service. “Regulations” that somehow other smaller companies and the cards they offer are not subject to? I’ll definitely never buy the Singtel ones again. And if you ever snoop through my blog, Singapore government, I do like you in general, but this specific regulation is stupid since so much of your ecosystem, even the infrastructure tourists relies on, uses SMS.

Anyway, I left in disgust and took the MRT further west. I had a vague idea that I was maybe going to visit Jurong East Station (always somewhat of a misleading name, you’d think at first glance that you’d need to go east to reach it, but Jurong is on the west side of the island, the station is just on its east side. Also, Jurong East is the last stop on the North line, so you can go north or west to reach Jurong East…) to walk around. Instead, I saw this building when the train stopped at Buona Vista MRT Station, and I knew I had to explore it, so I hopped off impulsively and got hopelessly lost in Buona Vista MRT Station for a good five minutes before I found my way out and toward the mall in question.

This mall is called The Star Vista, and is apparently a combination of Singapore’s first naturally cooled semi-indoors mall as well as a performing arts centre on top of it. I couldn’t visit the latter since that was probably only open to patrons with tickets when events were going on, but the lower mall part was interesting. It was sheltered from the rain and sun but not the warm, humid wind which flowed through the place, and the natural lighting of the sun. It was much warmer than a regular shopping centre but still cooler than being outdoors. And it looked neat.

I also found a nice hidey hole area near the escalators going up to the restricted event area of the mall. Definitely a secret retreat known only to locals.

Gemini also told me about another mall nearby called Rochester Mall that I went to check out. This one was indoors and packed with nothing but tutoring and learning centres, plus a couple of body health places like a dentist and a therapy clinic or two. Very weird.

Because of the nature of those shops, practically all the outsides of the shop were just intake areas for their students before they got shuttled off into back rooms, and visually there was nothing interesting to see, however this mall also had plenty of paper ephemera to collect which advertised the tutoring services of the centres, so that was neat. Although it was an indoor mall, I also found this outdoor area:

More blocked off escalators. The view was nice but made me a little lonely. It was also a dead end so I enjoyed the sensation of being lost for a bit, then headed back to the MRT Station.

My next stop was a market near an LRT station called Bangkit, but to get there I had to take the train and transfer to another line to reach Bukit Panjang MRT station, where this was set up in front of Hillion Mall, next to the station.

That was a pasarmalam, or night market, that I was aware of and was planning to come back to later in the evening. It was nice to see it there in the daylight, though it was smaller than I had expected. Anyway, I went from the MRT Station to the attached LRT one and sat on the Singapore LRT service for the first time.

These LRT trains were two carriages long and completely driverless. They also had an interesting quirk — they travelled around the neighbourhood in a much more intimate way than the MRT trains do, passing by very close to HDB blocks, but the windows of the train turn a misty sort of opaque when passing by the blocks to protect the privacy of the people living in those blocks. And I guess to prevent those people from snooping into the LRT trains too.

Anyhow, the place I eventually ended up at was called Bangkit Market or Bangkit Art Street due to the umbrella roof and some murals at the side of the market that were mostly covered up with market-related boxes. This was apparently the closest thing to a Japanese-style shopping street/shoutengai in Singapore. I could see the reference. It was its own thing though, full of grocers and peddlers hawking their wares to people passing by. I loved the ambience here too.

There was a big statue at the far end of the market with Chinese Zodiac horoscopes written on it:

(The fourth wall of the statue just had a rack of bananas.)

I’m born in the Year of the Rat, so I guess I won’t have a very good year coming up, according to this random guru. There were also lots of shops on the side of the market behind the stalls, some affiliated with the stall in front if it, and some not. And signs like this one that speak of local customs unknown to outsiders:

I wondered how it would be like living in one of the HDB flats above this madhouse every day. I think I would actually like it a lot, personally.

There was a Mixue store there, apparently the store with the most number of retail locations in the world these days, and I noticed that they were having a promotion where you could get a promotional ang bao (red packet) for spending at least $7 there. Most of their drinks were $3-4, but I asked the staff if I could order one drink and buy one of the other trinkets on sale on a little stand at the side of the counter to make up the remaining $3.50. They hemmed and hawwed a bit — apparently for some reason it’s not a thing they’d been asked about or had to consider before — but eventually said yes, so I bought a taro grape drink and a trinket and got a red packet for my efforts.

There were at least two attached kopitiams as well, and another hawker centre nearby to book that I didn’t visit. But I did walk by the two coffee shops:

And I ate at one, trying out the Kway Chap Set (small, for $5) from a stall called Zheng Wei Braised Duck Noodles. The table was sticky and the tray was obviously dirty from not having been cleaned well, but the food itself was great, so it was a pretty typical Singapore kopitiam experience.

I went back through the market one more time after that and decided to splurge on a drink called Antelope Tea which was as expensve as the kway chap itself.

It was ah, er.. interesting. I didn’t really know how to describe it. It  tasted like herbal tea, but richer, not bitter in the least, and allllmost hitting the threshold to qualify as sweet but not quite there either. Apparently it’s made from the shavings of antelope horn or something?

Instead of taking the LRT back towards Hillion Mall, I decided to walk back this time, a pleasant walk that took me by pleasantly random mom and pop shops located in random void decks of random HDB flats…

I just.. but.. a local clinic that does surgery?!

Whatever. I really enjoyed this part of my day, wandering through neighbourhood blocks:

Despite all the liminal malls, all the night markets, all the train stations, all the Asian markets, and all the food places that I visited and explored today, this following little area actually became my favourite part of the day’s trip, just a random paved park next to a community garden in the middle of four or five HDB blocks:

Children were playing and riding little tricycles around as their parents sat on benches watching them, one elderly local lady was exercising on a stationery bike while looking at the plants in the community garden, and a warm wind swirled around me and rustled my skirt against my legs as I just stood there for a moment and stared at the blocks around me. It was a very carefree, mystical, lingering, nonbiri moment I loved. I told myself that I needed to walk more and find more of these sorts of hyper-local magical spots. This one was located between blocks 115 and 116, Pending Road.

After a couple minutes, I moved on, and soon found myself back in commercial space. Specifically, the inside of Hilling Mall, which looked somewhat like this:

I didn’t really explore it much, though there were a lot of food places here, but I was being distracted by some lion dance clanging going on, and I eventually found its source: a troupe was performing inside of an NTUC Fairprice supermarket and there were lions wandering around for some sort of event.

I didn’t really understand the specific context as to -why- they were performing here, but it was still neat to see. The mall also had an open area that I passed on the way out, where the NTUC Fairprice had set up a place selling discounted and seasonal clothing and goods:

I almost bought several things here but did walk away with a pair of shorts:

I’m always on the lookout for good, airy, and light shirts and shorts! I almost exclusively wear that sort of casualwear at home, even in Edmonton, and I feel like I never have enough of them. The shirts need to have nice patterns on them and the shorts need pockets though, and this one had three. And they must not be made of certain fabric types that I dislike.

Anyway, purchase secured, and finally I emerged at the site of the night market that I had seen earlier.

It was still in the evening, and as mentioned it wasn’t a very big one, and all but one stall were selling food and drinks. That one extra stall was similar to the other “visually red” store, selling a bunch of Chinese New Year style items.