I also noticed that a lot of drinks in Singapore, but not all, have a sort of A-D ranking system pasted upon them based on how “healthy” the product is in some capacity. This system is called Nutri-Grade (local), and I saw to my horror that some of my favourite drinks were C and D grade drinks.

Those came to no real surprise though. I saw some drink shops explaining the system outside their store and saying that you can request less of this or that to bump up the level of the drink, and I saw things like green tea leaves in the tea aisle in the supermarket touting their A-ratings. However, I saw a lot of drinks and bottles without any such rating as well, and I’m not clear enough on the system to know why some of them have ratings and some do not.

Also, while following a secret passage on the second level of the mall which led me behind some of the shops into an under construction area, I saw a sign on the level below me that read “”Do not lean” against the fence”. I thought the use of punctuation on the sign was really weird.

Singapore’s English translation signs are much better than say Japan, or China, or Taiwan/Hong Kong, since most Singaporeans are at least somewhat fluent in English, but they still sometimes have weird translations to be found.

I sat down on a bench to rest in the mall and caught myself nodding off, so I knew that it was definitely time to go. I took a bus back to the somewhat nearby Kallang MRT Station, the site of many of my childhood memories, though I knew that the little shops and buildings that I was familiar with were largely gone now. However, I saw to my horror that even the little park with the trees that I sat under with my friends as a kid were gone now. In its place, there was a REIT mall or something being built.

Those were views form down below, up on the train platform, and then from the train itself through slightly blurry windows. My poor childhood. The trees. The uncle with the ice cream cart. It’s all gone now in the name of progress.

As solace, I took the train to Tampines MRT again, but not for the malls this time. I walked northwards through the bus interchange:

And headed for one of the last bastions of my old memories that still existed in Singapore, Sun Plaza/Sunplaza Park. I had also visited the park two years ago, almost to the day, to say hello to my old childhood self, and this time I visited it again both to say hello to my childhood self as well as my previous presence from two years ago.

And just like last time, I quickly found a giant snail, or at least its shell.

This time though, I also saw a bunch of wild roosters and chickens wandering around. I guess they had moved in since the last time I was here, since I never remembered seeing them here before.

And then I went to my special place to say hello to my past selves, the sign and big star in the middle of the park.

From there, I decided to walk north to Pasir Ris Station, which was about 30 minutes away to the north on foot. I said in my blog post that I had walked here to this park *from* Pasir Ris Station as a kid before, but no part of this really long walk that I did felt remotely familiar, and it involved crossing an expressway at some point too, so I’m not actually sure that I had done that before in the past. I might have just walked from Tampines MRT Station instead, which would just have been a 5-10 minute walk.

There were nice walkways basically following and making a path beneath the train tracks though, linking park to park and running over drains and canals, making it easy for people to walk or cycle between the various parks that dotted this part of the country.

I even passed a pair of lovebirds enjoying some quiet time on a bench beneath the tracks, and snuck a picture of them.

The path eventually split off from the train tracks though, as the tracks went over a wooded mangrove-type area while the path crossed over that aforementioned nearby expressway and into residential areas. Sunset was near and the weather had started to cool down even before I reached Sunplaza Park, so this entire walk was, for once, really enjoyable and not overwhelmingly hot and humid.

I reached Pasir Ris Station soon after, and the vicinity of this station was also receiving renovations and a new mall, Pasir Ris Mall, that looked to be nearly done.

There were already two other malls nearby that I saw and passed by but did not enter though, White Sands and Downtown East, the latter with a really misleading name since Pasir Ris was basically on the very eastern side of the country, about as far away as one could get from downtown. Instead, I went to an outdoor food centre that I had also come to the last time I was in Singapore, Pasir Ris Central Hawker Centre.

The “managed by Kopitiam” part concerned me as generally the indoor food courts in malls are usually more expensive and comfortable and “organized” in a way that REIT malls are, without things like overlapping types of food, whereas the outdoor food courts in hawker centres are usually cheaper, but with the trade off of being perhaps dirtier, hotter, and with a random hodgepodge of stalls that often compete directly with each other. Kopitiam is one of the indoor mall food court companies though, so I’m not sure what they were doing out here taking over an outdoor food court like this, but oh well.

I had been to this mall twice before, once on May 29 2022 where I ended up having a dish that I really liked, and again on Jun 05 2022 where I ended up having a dish that I disliked. I came back to the same store again as I had been somewhat craving the soup dish that I really liked, and although it looked like the prices had risen since the last time I was here, I went for it anyway, ordering a bowl of Chinese Spinach Seafood Soup with Fish and Thin Bee Hoon for $9.70. (The Thin Bee Hoon cost 70 cents, and the $9 soup with fish was the middle-sized option — there was no longer a cheaper option without fish unless I went for the smallest-sized bowl of soup.) With an additional $1.60 rose syrup/bandung drink from another store on top of it, this meal came out to be $11.30, definitely on the expensive end of any meal I’ve eaten in a while. Still, the soup was really good.

My phone was almost dead by this point, probably thanks to planting too many flowers in Pikmin Bloom as I wandered around, since that eats up a lot of battery for some reason. But I took a quick jaunt around the park next to the hawker centre anyway, revisiting the playground that I had seen the last time I was here:

The fishing areas that I had seen the last time I was here:

The weird fancy lakeside restaurant/cafe that was here the last time I was here:

And these chickens and roosters that were.. wait a minute.

Apparently they’ve moved into this park as well. I never really saw these wild roosters and chickens at all when I lived here back in the 90s, or at least never remembered them, so it’s weird that they seem to be a thing now. Even back in 2022, I remember seeing them when I wandered around downtown, and inside people’s yards, but I definitely never saw them in these parks. Now today I’d seen them in two parks that I thought I had known somewhat well. Weird.

I made it home without incident after this, and then spent most of the night sorting through and culling the horde of pictures that I had taken today. It seems like the power connection for my laptop is acting up again, and occasionally not charging even though it’s “plugged in”, though it’s not as bad as it was before.. yet. I had been worried about this since the power cord had to be bent at a bit of a weird angle in this lodging in order to reach the laptop power socket, since it’s on the right side of the laptop, whereas the power brick itself is plugged into an outlet on the left side of the bed. Oh well. It only really needs to survive two more days or so before I arrive home. At least I didn’t have to face any more flies that night (once I found that other ajar window and shut it.)