This is something we did over the weekend.  Late one afternoon we got off the MRT at Raffles Place and headed towards the river.  From there you can look across at the Asian Civilizations Museum (yellow building on the right), the Stamford Raffles Landing Place (white statue) and some other stuff.  We didn’t cross over, but headed north along the river walk.  Click on this and other pictures to see more details.

We walked by a lot of big shiny buildings and an astonishingly ugly bulbous sculpture of a bird, then found ourselves looking at this building with the coordinated rainbow-colored shutters.  Again, you may need a bigger version to see the colors properly; the hot damp weather was not propitious for clear photography:

 

 

Lots of restaurants next to the river walk, lots of waiters accosting us and asking us if we wouldn’t like to stop for drinks, which we didn’t. But eventually we left them behind in the main tourist part of town (Boat Quay and Clark’s Quay) and entered more peaceful surroundings, where we crossed a footbridge to the eastern side of the river.  There are lots and lots of bridges, but the most colorful is this one, painted by Pacife Abad:

Nice, eh?  And here’s what it looks like from the eastern side:

 

 

 

 

 

 

This was at Robertson Quay, a very quiet but artsy section of the waterfront.  We proceeded on up the river, and eventually were in clearly non-tourist areas, full of high-end condos and hotels.  This looked like an idyllic gazebo outside of one:Note how the Singapore style requires extensive landscaping and trees for shade.  This helps people feel better about the 90% humidity and equivalent (or higher) temperatures year-round.  There was a light breeze near the water, too, which helped.

But if you really want to see how the city is engineered for tourism, just look at these same places at dusk and sunset, when we headed back south.  Here’s the Abad Bridge at dusk:  Part of the brightness is from my flash, but part is from the unobtrusive mood lighting from below.  The colors come alive as the sky dims.  Very inviting, yes?  So we crossed back over to the west side of the river here, and headed south.    From Clark Quay I took this picture of the east-side eateries:  note the nice tour boats (which also operate as ferries up and down the river), lit with Chinese lanterns.  There are the traditional two-story shophouses behind the eateries, and then the long bank of sheltered tables themselves, elevated above the river walk on that side, set aside by painted rounded concrete barriers that keep customers from falling into the river or tipping their chairs onto the sidewalk (in cases of extreme drunkenness, which I am confident occur here with some regularity).  There’s some kind of high-tech plexiglass structure to the left, sheltering people who walk beyond the confines of the building from rain.  And off to the right there’s a bungy attraction; you and another person can sit in comfort, strapped in to two (or five) seats abreast.  The seats are attached by super bungy cords on either side to  towers, and after a suitably impressive countdown there’s a release of dry ice for a foggy special effect, and a lauch.  The chairs go shooting upward about 65 feet, and then bounce up and down for a while until the towers lower them back to the ground.  Plenty of screaming, and probably a certain amount of vomiting, but not the time we saw it.

OK, enough gross stuff!  The final picture gives another idea of the mood lighting on the waterfront.  This is a pedestrian bridge between the Asian Civilizations Museum and the area closest to the MRT station.  Look at this in some detail and see how subtle the lighting is.  It’s almost enough to reconcile me to living in Singapore.

May 6th, 2009 | Category: Entertainment, public policy, Uncategorized | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL