Oddly enough, in the middle of all that, there was a little fountain pond with a terrapin that one could donatem oney to get food to feed it. I only catalogued it, I didn’t actually feed it. Sorry terrapin.

I left Haw Par Villa after this, and begin to consider what I wanted for my last meal in town. I hadn’t had a really good plate of Fried Hokkien Mee yet, so I did some googling to find a highly rated store in town, and settled on a store called Original Serangoon Fried Hokkien Mee, near Farrer Park MRT Station, which was a new station to me and on a train line (the North East Line) that I had barely ever sat on at all. I made my way over there and passed by some nice architecture and shops on the 5-10 minute or so walk from the station to the store.

The store itself was one of several stalls in a slightly squalid roadside coffee shop/kopitiam, and there were a bunch more stalls located in an adjacent space across a minor side road that might or might not have been considered part of the same kopitiam too, I wasn’t too sure. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a coffee shop split by a road though, so probably not, especially since our chairs were red and their chairs were grey, but then it would be weird that there were two kopitiams so close to each other too.

I made my order anyway and things got a bit weird here because an old uncle took my order, and a few minutes later I saw a woman pouring a plate of hokkien mee into a takeout container for what seemed to be my order. I clarified that I was eating here, not bringing the order home, and the woman said something about the uncle being hard of hearing and probably mishearing my order, and she poured my order back onto a plate instead. Then she was confused and asked what my exact order was, as in their books I had ordered two $10 plates of hokkien mee to go. I said I had ordered only one plate, and that it was to stay, and showed them the $10 note in my hand. The old uncle got chided by the woman for getting the order so wrong, and when I also apologized she said again that he could be hard of hearing and that people sometimes had to speak louder for him to hear the order or somethin. Not that I had any way of knowing (and why didn’t he confirm the order with me if he wasn’t sure?) but they didn’t blame me for it.

Anyway this plate, while expensive, was excellent, and there were smaller and cheaper versions of the dish too, I just picked the one with the largest portion to have as much as possible of my favourite dish for what was ostensibly my final meal here.

I then walked back toward the station after that very satisfying meal, passing this neat-looking temple along the way. This was the Sri Srinivasa Perumal Temple, according to Google Maps.

There was a local mall that I wanted to visit, both to cool off and to visit  the local supermarket for some last-minute items that Kel wanted. This mall was called City Square Mall:

And from the outside it looked neat, there was a little hedge garden and an outdoor playground outside the front door, as well as a downstairs area with what looked like a mini amusement area with a bouncy castle or something.

But when I got in, it looked like the mall was half-dead, even though there was a good amount of foot traffic since it was connected to the MRT Station underground and since Little India in general, where this area was considered to be in, tended to be perpetually busy. The upstairs floors, for example, looked like there were plenty of closed shops:

Lots of shops were open downstairs though, and I went down, taking note of weird escalator layouts:

Although lots of shops were open in the basement, half the basement seemed to be covered in temporary construction floorings as well, making walking around weird as it felt like the floor was wobbling a little as people walked around since there were little air pockets underneath the temporary floor.

Either way, it wasn’t a very nice mall, but the supermarket was nice and big, so I grabbed the items that Kel wanted, as well as a box of tea for myself, and then hurried out of the store before I got sick since my sweat had not dried up yet and the air-conditioning was very powerful inside the supermarket. I did get tangled up at the self-checkout station  and had to be rescued twice by the attendant, once because it wouldn’t accept my phone’s contactless credit card swipe and I had to bring out the physical card for the reader to accept it, and then again right after that because the receipt dispenser had gotten stuck somehow and needed to be untangled. But somehow I escaped with my loot and made my way home.

My plane ride the next day was at 8:45 am, and I had been trying to figure out what the quickest route from my lodging to the nearby Changi Airport was. I had several options, a bus and train rides from several train stations near me, but the first bus looked like it would get me to the airport only by 6:15 am, and only if I caught it on time, whereas the trains looked like they would get me there even later. The one exception was a train ride from Expo Station, the third nearest station to me and about a 20 minute walk away from me, which would get me there before 6 am, if I wanted to drag my suitcase along 20 minutes worth of pavement in the morning heat to get there.

I had no idea if it was feasible, but I at least wanted to try and scout out that route, so I took the train station to that line since the ride home from Farrer Park MRT Station took me to Chinatown Station for my transfer onto the Circle Line, which both my nearest station, Upper Changi Station, as well as this Expo Station, were on. So I took the train to that station, the very end station in the line, and started walking from there. The sun had gone behind some clouds by this time and was about an hour from setting, so I took a picture of the sky and started to walk home.

About halfway home, when I was standing by a traffic light with a bunch of other people, I saw one of them also snapping photographs of the sky with his phone, and when I tooked at why he was doing that, I saw that one of the clouds was glimmering like a rainbow even though there had been no rain that day since possibly the very early morning.

The glimmering rainbow cloud is in the middle of the shot there. Very neat. I wonder what phenomenon or reflection caused that.

When I got back to the house, I met Belinda and chatted to her for some time about Singapore and Canada and retirement and finances and housing prices and weather and other such adult topics. I gave her one of my remaining Edmonton postcards, and also talked to her about my schedule the next day and my different options as to when I would be leaving to be able to reach the airport on time. 6:15 am was probably fine, I said, for the 8:45 am flight, even though it would probably mean that I wouldn’t have much time in the Changi Airport lounge if I wanted to spend one of my remaining lounge entitlements (I think I still have 4 out of 6 for the year) on it there. John came by at this point, and said that either he or Belinda could give me a ride tomorrow morning to the airport for free, if I met them downstairs at 6:10 am or so tomorrow, which sounded great to me. He said it would only take about 5-10 minutes from the house. That sounded a lot less stressful than public transport, so that was nice of them!

Finally, this is a picture of the loot that I acquired today.