Debbie was holding an art exhibit over the weekend called Reworlding (local) that she had suggested I stop by to, so that was the big plan for the day. Well, technically, the exhibit had been running for a while now, but this weekend was the final weekend and she was presenting a talk/demonstration on Saturday, so that’s when I planned to go.

This art installation was located north and west of where I am, a little out of the way from everything else, but I started my day by duly wandering north to look for breakfast away from the downtown core of the city. So my first stop was Toa Payoh MRT Station and the surrounding shops around it. I do like this area quite a bit and have been here on my previous trips too, there’s lots to explore and I’ve never really fully wandered every alley because it’s so sprawling. This time was no different. I started in the central area next to the MRT Station:

And then wandered east from there, toward one of two food courts nearby. Gemini had cheerfully suggested that one when I asked it to pick a hawker centre along the northern train line, and then, unbidden, hallucinated a suggested stall that was in a different food court nearby, plus a second stall that I believe didn’t exist in Toa Payoh at all, but I don’t really have an issue choosing specific stalls once I reach a hawker center since I’ll eat anything so I don’t care for its specific recommends — it doesn’t have to be famous or Michelin-approved food only or anything and in fact those stalls are kind of annoying to buy from since they usually come with long queues.

Anyway, winding my way east out of the station sent me through the type of hyper-local shopping area that I love and wish Canada had.

I also found one more of these big statues with horoscope guru readings on them, they basically say the same things as the one from yesterday though since they’re based on the same star readings:

I’m not sure if it fully ever registered with me but Tigey, being “born” in 1998, specifically was born in the Year of the Tiger. I’m a Rat myself, from 1984, and all three zodiac board things have put the Rats as having a bad next year, something like 11th out of the 12 signs in terms of overall luck/prosperity. Tiger’s been dead last two of the three times, but this one puts it at #2 overall instead, so Tigey wanted a picture of these to be captured. Please be nice and generous to me with your boundless luck and wisdom this year, Tigey.

I also found, and went through, one more of these red pavilion tents. I almost bought a small horse plushie here, but it felt a little pricey at $8.80. Maybe I still should get one though.

Next to it, with an equally large setup, was a random goods and knick-knacks tent. I don’t even know what to call it.

I remember these brushes on the bottom right of the picture below here! We used it to scrub our school shoes when we were young. See My Diary #073.

I ended up buying a couple of these powder puffs because they break down way too easily but are always useful at home for applying powder:

And then I wandered off. My ephemeral catch for the day was in the Toa Payoh Library, which I’d also visited before in the past:

They had a free books donation section, and amongst all the books there I found this gem:

It’s an anthology of writing and creative works by young students in Kheng Cheng School, circa 2017, and is exactly the kind of thing I want to find, bring home, scan, and upload to the Internet Archive or elsewhere for preservation. This sort of work is very local and very ephemeral otherwise, but contain a great snapshot of the times, snippets from people that might or might not become famous in some way eventually (both are equally significant — if famous, then it’s a showcase of their early work. If not famous, it might be the only record of their life), and to paraphrase something a little pretentious I’ve read in the past, it acts as a snapshot of the anxieties of the children of the times. Best of all, the book is small and light.

I took some random pictures once I got back to the hotel room and was preparing this post as well:

This is quite possibly the best piece of treasure I’ve found on this trip, and it kind of makes me want to check out and see if there are any second-hand bookstores in town worth visiting. Or maybe other libraries, although I think I just lucked out with this one as it’s probably not really a library book exchange staple either.

After leaving the library, I continued east and northeast and took this picture that I am formally entitling “Bicycle”. You see, it acts as a snapshot of the anxieties of the bicycles of the times, temporarily forgotten and left to bake in the sun by its owner who has used it as a staging ground for market raids.

Finally, I arrived at my breakfast place, at 12:39 pm. This was Toa Payoh Vista Market. Not all the stalls were open by this time, but an intriguing roti prata place called Rahmath Cheese Prata caught my eye, because while I like roti prata, I’ve only ever had it plain or with egg. I’ve never heard of all these weird types of ingredients on offer here.

I had the banana and egg one for $3.50. It was uhh… interesting. The banana was sliced up and shoved inside the roti prata rather than being mashed in, which I expected at first. I’m not sure it went well together, but I’m not sure it didn’t either. It’d be something I need to try more of to decide.

I went for a quick walk in a nearby park called the Toa Payoh Sensory Park after that:

It’s small and was very shaded, so that was nice, but I’m not sure you can call yourself a sensory park just because you have an echo ball thing and a small fountain installed. There was nothing sensory about this park unless you mean how much squinting and mental gymnastics you have to do to justify that title. A man was seated in a gazebo blasting out some music though, that part was auditory at least.

I headed back towards the train station afterwards, passing by a furniture sale under some tarps. This seemed.. unwise, considering how much it rains in Singapore (and even without that, how humid and damaging the weather is).

Debbie‘s talk started at 3 pm, and it was almost 2 pm at this point, so instead of taking a train anywhere else, I opted for a bus from the Toa Payoh Interchange instead. I took the 163 headed to Sengkang, which passed by the Tagore area along the way, or at least close enough for me to walk the rest of the way.

Tagore is an industrial area kinda underserved by any sort of transit or amenities, set a bit away from the nearest satellite town and surrounded mostly by unused land or parks on three sides and a condominium estate or something on the fourth side. It was still a 20 minute walk from the bus stop to the actual location of the exhibition. This walk did take me by the weirdest vending machine location that I’ve ever seen.

Why the heck is it balanced over the drain on planks like that? I mean I guess it’s for a power outlet on the back side, but still, what a weird place to find a vending machine, on a long lonely road with basically zero foot traffic. And the prices were decently good, too! But I didn’t bite.

I finally found the exhibition hall, called “starch” in classic artsy lowercase, on the second floor of one of the industrial buildings.

I went inside to look for Debbie, as I had arrived at 2:55 pm, just in time for the presentation at 3 pm, only to then be informed by one of the two facilitators at the table that the start time had been pushed back to 4 pm, and “didn’t I get the email about it”? What? No, of course not, I had learnt about the event through our shared WhatsApp channel and there was nothing posted there. Nor was it pushed out on Debbie‘s newsletter thing (which I am signed up for but which I’ve never received a newsletter on).

Anyway, this did at least give me time to go examine the exhibits, which I did, but I didn’t really understand or have the patience for most of them, though it turned out two of them were out of commission, a third was a film projection thing that I couldn’t see until later in the afternoon because the glare of the window behind it overrode the light from the projector, a fourth was a cool-looking game simulation but which took too long to work through, a fifth was an entirely audio presentation which I was not going to do because it involved sticking earbuds in my ear while I was sweating buckets from the walk here and the room wasn’t air-conditioned or cooled, and the 6th (somehow they were 7 female artists but only 6 exhibits, I’m still not quite sure why), was Debbie‘s and was a neat mockup of a board game together with a poster of a mildly dystopian tech repair store. I liked that the most, no biases or anything.

This also gave me time to go down to the canteen that I had passed by on the way in, so that I could grab some lunch. The place was mostly deserted and the two stores that were open turned out to be operated by the same guy anyway:

I ended up having some mutton briyani with lady’s finger and curry on it, for $5.

It was okay, I didn’t love it though, as it was the type of briyani/biryani that relied too much on inedible spices (star anise and a couple of other things) rather than the strength of its curry/gravy, which is what I favour.

I then went upstairs and met Debbie for her presentation. I was super happy to see her. It turned out she had to postpone the start of this one as many of the campuses and Universities were taking this week to do their open houses and she had been pulled in to do a demo/presentation by the place that she worked at, at the last minute. She had rushed over here right after that. This also kind of gave me a clue as to something else I could be visiting and looking for ephemera at. University open houses. Hmm.

Anyway, the presentation involved using VRChat and looking at a bunch of worlds that Debbie had set up. It was the first time using VRChat for most of the people there, I think, including me, but she showed us that it could run on our phones, and talked about a number of things like the strengths and limitations of the media, and then how she had used it to capture and reimagine other VR creations that she had seen into little private worlds of her own, and then had invited the people who made the exhibits for this show to those private worlds and asked them to make their exhibit out of their own interpretation of each assigned world. Very neat. We also spent some extra time at the end jumping around to different VRChat worlds as she showcased several cool ones that she had found.

It was 5 pm by the time this ended, and there were five or six other attendees in all, who I believe were all people that Debbie knew in her social/professional circle. She gave everyone who stayed a brief tour of the exhibits, and then I was hoping to catch up with her and chat a bit, but after two minutes another guy barged his way into the conversation and steered the conversation over to some University-centric stuff that they shared that I had no hope of partaking in conversation about, and then a third and fourth person joined in and the conversation became about the exhibits itself.

It was neat to listen in on an aspect of her professional life that I did not know much about, and I love that her excitement and passion always bubbles through to the surface when she’s talking, I’m a big fan of what she does because my own work is not very far removed from it (extensive dream diary, digital archaeology and preservation, the exploration of liminal spaces, a strong focus on archiving things, and so on).

But I stayed around for 90 minutes after the end of the one hour presentation, which was itself delayed by one hour, and the journey here and back was also basically an hour’s detour off the main route combined, and only because I took another Grab car ride back to the nearest train station after all was said and done because it was pouring rain. So while this was a neat look at her presentation and her own self-run/managed exhibit (she curated the entire thing!) and professional life, the most disappointing part was basically carving out 4.5 hours of my prime afternoon/evening time while on vacation to go meet her and then only getting to chat with her for two minutes.

And yes, I’m well aware that there’s a certain level of self-importance on my part coming through there, as I was stepping into a professional arena within which she had responsibilities, but it’s not like everyone else who wanted a piece of her time was not also just shooting the breeze. Come on, you can go have lunch with her any day of the week, you both live in the same country. (Assumedly anyway, I don’t actually know that they weren’t visitors from abroad or another planet like me too.) Plus how the initial invite came through — a “Come to my exhibition! Happy to show you around!” invitation on WhatsApp when I was putting out feelers for people that I could meet up with while in town, and the end result being a two minute chat before we got waylaid and no chance for me to talk about myself or even my responses to the work, did not feel good. It felt very transactional and one-sided.

Listen to me! I do many cool things that seem to tangentially mesh well with what you do too! I want to know you better and bounce ideas off of each other! And you never followed up with me about the liminal shopping mall thing you were building from the last time we met! Aaaaaargh. Okay, now that all that is off my chest. I still do think the world of her. Shit happens. I did feel like I was a space alien listening in and watching though, and that we walk and work only in completely different realms, and it made me a little wistfully sad. But I do like and admire her a fair amount and will still try to see if I can get her an invite to one of the gatherings that I’m trying to set up in the next few days.

It was pouring rain when I left, and unlike a more residential or commercial area of Singapore, where I think I can get by without an umbrella for the most part (although the journey to/from my specific hotel is uncovered for a bit in all directions), this place was trouble. I did, as mentioned, eventually take a Grab ride back to the nearet station, which was Lentor Station on the Thomson-East Coast Line. I don’t think the falling rain came through very well on the picture, but it did look like this while I was waiting for the car to arrive.

Once at Lentor Station, I took the train south to Mayflower Station, because I liked the name and wanted to check out a nearby hawker centre that was connected to the station exit by roofs.

I passed by a nice rainswept square along the way. I wonder if there were more horoscopes there.

When I reached the hawker centre though, I found out that basically everything was already closed. Oops.

Though I did find a few store vendors singing karaoke off a tablet and a microphone very loudly in the middle of the closed hawker centre. That was worth the (not very long) journey!

I returned to the train and took it a couple more stops south, to Upper Thomson MRT Station. Connected to that was a mall called Thomson Plaza, which Gemini helpfully told me was partially REIT and partially strata. Weird. What was even more weird was the internal structure of the mall.

There was a very chaotic energy sort of way in which it was connected, and I liked it a lot. There was also a fair going on on the ground floor:

Technically there was a no photograph sign on the outer front door, but I don’t listen to chronically-hostile signs like that, especially when I didn’t ese any more of those inside. Maybe they just really didn’t want people taking a picture of the door? No one seemed to mind as I wandered around and took a picture of a stall selling mahjong tables (with bonus plushies), for example.

That was certainly new to me too. Also, at some point I found a side passage that opened up into a huge, entirely new section of the mall. The mall iteslf seemed to have a lot of restaurants and various food places.

But tonight I was just looking for something comforting, and not random outdoor hawker center food while it was pouring rain, so I went to that Koufu in the first of the two pictures above, which is one of Singapore’s indoor REIT food court franchises styled after the kopitiams of yore. I had some Lor Mee for $5.50, and a cup of Bandung for $2.70 that was served in a weird no-straw container.

And then I took my time to wander the mall a bit more until I noticed that the rain had stopped. I took the train further down to Orchard Road MRT and walked home from there, stopping by an NTUC Fairprice variant shop (Fairprice Finest — I wonder what the difference is) to pick up a couple of drinks that I wanted to down back at the hotel as a treat.

I had a shower, consolidated my loot, and promptly fell asleep for a good 6-7 hours or so!