I took a couple pictures of my lodging early this afternoon just before I went out, of the common areas of the house where the host family (Belinda, John, or the single one of their five daughters that still currently lives with them) sometimes can be found hanging out. Their house isn’t particularly clean (and neither is my room), but is stuffed full with, uh, personality in the form of artifacts and items.

This is the little second-level hallway to my room (which is at the end of the hall), much better than the little outdoor path atop a dirty drain leading to the maid room behind the house.

For pictures of the room itself, see two days ago. The other side of the hallway leads to the second floor landing:

There’s a third floor too but I have not gone up there, since all the guest rooms are on the second floor. Down on the first floor there’s a living room area:

And to the left of that a dining room area:

And to the left of that, the indoor kitchen:

As opposed to the outdoor kitchen, which is beyond that door at the back of the indoor kitchen, and can be seen from my post three days ago. Much later in the day, while doing laundry in the late evening after I had arrived home, I also had the pleasure of briefly meeting the other two guests that were staying in the house, Kishore and Samit. They’re both Indians, and Kishore is the one that shares the bathroom with me (with dual lockable doors leading to each of our rooms) while Samit is the one who has the master bedroom with its own bathroom at the moment. They’re both long-term residents of the place, and I was reminded that Belinda had made an off-the-cuff comment the other day that she had tried lowering the prices of the rooms at one point (below the $50-$80 a day that it already is, I guess) but that attracted a certain type of renter that she didn’t want in the house.

I left the house after that, armed with an umbrella as I set off into the mid-afternoon rain-drenched world. It was still drizzling slightly but the rain was tapering off for the day, and naturally since I brought an umbrella along, there was no more rain for the rest of the day. I walked toward the secondary nearby MRT Station today, Upper Changi, and took this picture of a weird gnome with a whistle or something standing outside someone’s house on the way there.

I took a train from that station down to Chinatown Station, and ended up in a mall connected to that station, Chinatown Point. The architecture of the mall was interesting, the circular path ringing the shopping centre curled around so that you slowly descended as you walked clockwise along it, or ascended if you went the other way.

I walked around that mall briefly, then stepped out and crossed a road and came onto part of the Chinatown Street Market area, specifically Pagoda Street, though I think it stretches across a few streets.

The area was very tourist-trappy though, so I didn’t stay here long, but it was notable because I recognized this area from an IRL streamer on Twitch that I had watched a few months ago, awkwards_travel. One of the two streamers that use that channel had been in Singapore at the time when I first tuned in to it, and they came to this area and watched a live busker here and even saw and commented on an adult toys shop that was in the area, which I also found today but did not take a picture of. It was very cool, but due to that stream I knew that this place was full of things like tourist souvenirs and not a place that interested me.

Instead, I was headed to two strata malls that were across the road. The first one was called People’s Park Complex:

Which I reached via an overhead bridge that had a nice pagoda-themed garden and rest area up top on the bridge itself.

There was a hawker centre named People’s Park Food Centre next to it:

And I hadn’t eaten anything up to that point, so I went to a random store and ordered some fried carrot cake from them.

I did not like this dish, as there was no sauce and no chai poh (preserved radish) topping, so it was rather tasteless. This was my bad though, as what I should have done was taken a small or medium helping ($3 or $4 respectively) instead of the large one ($5) and saved some money and room for another dish from another stall instead, since there were so many choices. Instead, it was tasteless but filling enough that I didn’t end up eating anything else from the hawker centre.

There were also a bunch of stalls outside the hawker centre and outside People’s Park Complex itself, kind of attached to the general blob of buildings without actually being part of the mall or the food centre. This included a bakery shop named “bunnies” which had a tagline of “freshly baked” and positioned it so it looked like “freshly baked bunnies”.

There was also an ice cream cart that reminded me of the uncle that used to run a cart by Kallang MRT Station and the Kallang McDonalds area, an integral part of my long-gone childhood memories. His cart looked very similar to this one, just with a different brand.

I also ran into a curry puff store with a bunch of awards called Tanglin Crispy Curry Puff Original.

Apparently there’s a whole bunch of history (local) behind this store and a similar store owned by the family, which was a very intriguing read. This wasn’t one of the main store branches though, and I had no idea about any of that history when I saw the store, but I can confirm that their curry puffs are amazing.

These might be some of the best curry puffs that I’ve ever eaten. I paid $2 each for two of them, the potato chicken with eggs curry puff and the fish otah curry puff, and the first one in particular was super nice, while the second one was just nice.

In between my lunch and that snack, I had also walked around the entirety of the interior of People’s Park Complex, a shopping centre that seemed packed full with travel agents and massage parlours. And to a lesser extent, jewellery stores, medicinal stores, and electronic stores. Even one store that was half medicinal and half clothing, which was a really weird mix of products. That shop features in the last picture in the following gallery.