Blog 28 Singapore's other temptations

Friday 23rd was our chance to visit Chinatown - a huge area, perhaps architecturally unlike anything we had seen in China, but in mood and liveliness certainly similar.

There are long streets set with pastel coloured old buildings with Chinese touches. The street markets are crammed full of tempting stalls and there are wonderful temples to be found. (East meets west just inside the door of the temple)

The Hindu Sri Mariamman Temple, is similar in style to the Chettiar one with its many coloured figurines heaped in layers and large cow effigies representing Shiva. We discovered that yesterday's ceremony was a purification one, encouraging the expulsion of evil and ill health.

The Jamae Chulia Mosque one the 1820's site of an earlier one is calm and dignified and welcoming and finally we went to the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple. This is a towering red and gold edifice, with serenely beautiful interiors, as various buddhas and myriads of miniature ones set into the walls glow in several temple rooms on different floors. But the highlight was a perfect orchid garden on the rooftop surrounding a small building housing a prayer wheel.

The tooth itself was in the museum and shut until later that day but we couldn't stay to wait to see it.
As we had spent more time than planned enjoying shopping and a light lunch we decided to postpone the planned visit to the Jurong Bird Park and go instead to Orchard Road (Singapore's Oxford Street writ large and apparently where the missing population in other streets could be instantly discovered). We were surprised to find that prices here were similar to those in the UK as elsewhere is generally much cheaper, though admittedly we were never up to checking out every store.
Back for a rest and to freshen up for the big Raffles experience.

We walked over to the main entrance foyer to see what that was like inside and yes, it is spectacularly lovely and in a world of its own, with its Somerset Maughan hunting ground of the Writers' Bar and tiffen available if you want it in the afternoon. But we were there for the famous (and delicious) 'Singapore Sling' in the Long Bar (as are so many other tourists) and dinner later. The Long Bar, with its lines of constantly swaying palm fans and astonishing mounds of monkey nut shells all over the floor thrown down as you eat the nuts with your cocktail was suitably shadowy, though I didn't feel a novel coming on as too many of us there were obviously just lookers-on rather than real live performers. Dinner was set in the vast palm-treed courtyard, complete with singer and band a vast number of waiters but there were sadly two missing ingredients which took the edge off the experience. Fish was available but cooked without any flair to a dullness I hadn't experienced anywhere before and other diners were thin on the ground (though now we know why). Richard struggled manfully with a small hairy crab, but both of us were left feeling hungry and decided to go elsewhere for desert. What a wasted opportunity. Perhaps during the rainy season the tourists are too few to make the effort for, or perhaps they just need to find some new cooks. Anyway 20/10 for looks and 1/10 for achievement but still well worth seeing.
We had the tiramisu we needed at a very strange new area called Chijmes. It is a hugely lively series of individual restaurants covering every continent and seemed to be the place that everyone who wasn't at Raffles had rushed to. All this is beautifully set in the grounds of a converted elegant white church and the church itself is now used as a venue for weddings and parties generally. However, it felt uncomfortably to me like an altar to Mammon which is perhaps appropriate for Singapore's mass materialism but it was sad to find such a beautiful church no longer used for prayer.