Having a Blog can sometimes be difficult. It's like a resolution that you make, in public, and having made a promise to do something, you then feel guilty if you haven't lived up to that promise and fulfilled what you set out to do. I felt a little bit like that after the holidays. A little bit lazy and out of ideas, already...and I had only just begun. So I decided to visit Chinatown again, to see what I could see...
I've always thought of Chinatowns as places for tourists. After all, seventy-five percent of people currently living in Singapore are Chinese. Chinese restaurants are found island-wide, as are Buddhists temples. So why visit your local Chinatown then? Well, I was only partly right. It turns out that there's a little more to Chinatown than just Chinese food or a temple visit. The street architecture of our little Chinatown here combines elements of baroque and Victorian architecture hardly seen in other areas of Singapore. It has been preserved largely for tourism, but also as a part of living heritage.
I headed for the Maxwell Road Hawker Centre with intentions of trying what many call "Singapore's most famous chicken rice" but it was lunch-hour, the line was long, it was a swelteringly hot day, and a table could not be found anywhere. My lunch companion, my son, said he wanted to eat chicken rice right away, and so we settled for something less-than-the-best-but-still-very-good a few stalls away where a couple seats had just been vacated. Tummies full, we continued on our stroll, peeking into the shops selling trinkets, "antiques" and colorful Hawaiian-style shirts. We ended our visit at the MRT station, boarding the train that would take us to another train platform to catch the third train that finally brought us home.
