Thursday I again started about noon. I took the train down to City Hall to go and check out the Raffles Hotel.
It had a very colonial feel to it and seemed quite posh. After checking that out, I grabbed some lunch. I stopped into a McDonald’s, to try something that isn’t on the menu back home. While they were advertizing Double Chicken McGrill, Double Chicken McSpicy, and Double Filet-o-Fish, I opted for the 4 McWings combo. Unlike Chicken McNuggets, I know which part of the chicken these are from.
They are coated in the spicy chicken batter and were pretty good. One of the other obscure things here in Singapore is some of their sales, they are actually really good deals. From 1pm-3pm was McHappy Hour and the McWings combo was S$5, where the wings by themselves are S$5.75. At another time, buying a bottle of water was S$2.50, or you could get two for S$2.25.
From there I went to St. Andrew’s Cathedral, an Anglican church. It was pretty big, and had a huge plot of land, quite the contrast for the rest of downtown.
There was also a pretty good vantage point of the top half of the Marina Bay Sands.
Just two blocks away was the Armenian Church of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, the oldest church in Singapore. It was very small and very simple, but there was something that drew me to it. They had a little cemetery near the back, which offered a good view of the church.
As I was walking it was starting to rain, so I raced to the National History Museum and made it there just in time before the skies opened up.
They had completed an extensive renovation a couple of years ago, and did a very good job of it. The Singapore History Gallery is one of the best museum spaces I’ve ever seen. It goes through the history of the country and you can take a few different paths with different stories and audio narrations. One of the things I really liked was the old bell from the St. Andrew’s Cathedral.
In their feature gallery in the basement, they had an exhibit called Dreams Reality from the Musée D’Orsay Paris. They had a bunch of French paintings, including some Monets, and Van Gogh’s Starry Night. And they allowed photography.
Next I crossed the street and headed to Fort Canning Park to the Battle Box, the bunker and Singapore HQ for the British during WWII. Using wax figures they recreated the final conference between Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival and his senior commanders where they reluctantly decided to surrender. As Winston Churchill put it, this was the “largest capitulation” in British history.
From the Battle Box, I hopped on the MRT and headed down to Chinatown.
I stopped into a little deli-looking store and had some kind of sliced pork square thing. It was like jerky but softer and way more flavourful.
Also in Chinatown is the Budda’s Tooth Temple, which even though it was getting dark, still looked fantastic.
After doing a bunch of shopping I walked down Maxwell Rd and took the MRT back to Orchard. At 313 Orchard (a mall) I did some more shopping and had some Indian food in the food court. I had Roti John, which is some sort of fried meat put on a sub bun with some sauce on top.
From there I walked down to Orchard Towers just to see what it was about, before taking the MRT and heading back home.
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