Singapore Night Festival 2008 – Week 1

It’s Monday and my fingers are having the blues so I won’t be typing out much but I’ll just paste some photos we took at the first weekend of Night Fest. Enjoy!

ps: for those of you wondering, my camera is a compact Fujifilm F100fd. And I love it!

The National Museum of Singapore, note the dancing couple in the middle

Sailing ship and dancer suspended in the air from wires

Extreme piano playing

Part of the crowd and a line of local girls in gigantic skirts on wheels

Giant luminescent ball – can’t really see it here but there’s a dancer suspended in the centre of the sphere

The moon (I assume) and two ladies

Dancers suspended from some really pretty balloons

Another view of the balloons – personally the red one is my favorite

Classical-style faces projected onto a screen of fine mist from a sprinkler

Water dance, a bit like gymnastics with goldfish in a bowl

Fire dance, ladies in nighties with pyromaniac tendencies

Fire umbrella, patent pending – waiting for scientific proof that spinning fiery spokes will keep you dry

Celebrating My Entry to the Late 20’s

My birthday’s over but the gathering’s happening this Saturday, 19 July 2008. We’re gonna have dinner at Ricciotti (Italian, which is a safe choice for all the picky eaters out there. I’ve never heard of anyone not liking Italian food. Well OK except my Dad, who, like many other Indonesians, his age especially, can only eat Indonesian and Indonesian-Chinese food. But not my friends. Nobody’s ever complained of Italian.) It’s gonna be followed by some board-games (I know I know. Geeky. Yeah.) and whatever thing you wanna do after since we’ll be around Boat Quay and Clarke Quay and there are watering holes abound.

I know it’s unrealistic to post an invitation here because nobody reads my blog anyway, but (hi, nobody!) do dress up in stripes and drop by if you wanna.

Update: we’re gonna head down to the Night Fest at 11.30pm

Library Book Sale

Date: 18 – 20 July 2008

Time: 9.30am – 8.00pm

Venue: Singapore Expo Hall 4A

The National Library’s having a garage sale, a “cuci gudang”. English & Chinese books are going at $2 a pop, magazines at $5 for a pack of 10. Malay and Tamil book are going at at $1 a pop and magazines at $5 for a pack of 20. Your purchase is limited to 50 copies, tho. And they also provide delivery service through SingPost.

Unfortunately I’ll only be able to visit the sale on Sunday (that’s the third and final day) cos today I’m gonna go to the night festival opening, then tomorrow we’re going on a field trip to the Matisse exhibition at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI) and my birthday dinner. So.. yeah I really really really hope they still have buy-worthy stuff left on Sunday. I can visualize the kiasu Singaporeans queueing up and loading their baskets up with any book they can find, and bringing along friends or members of the family so that they can buy more than the 50 book quota. Fingers crossed!

Update:

According to the bf there were 600 people waiting outside the hall before the sale opened this morning. Damn.

Singapore Night Festival

Date: 18 – 26 July 2008

Venue: National Museum, SMU lawn, and its vicinity

Time: at night

There’s gonna be some fun happening the next two weekends. Singapore is holding a Night Festival which includes performances spectacular (imported, of course) some outdoor Zouk-ing and a slew of other performances and installations.

The Italian aerial Performance, The Dancing Sky by Studi Festi, will be on 18 and 19 July at 9.00pm at the National Museum with a second performance at 11.30pm. It’s gonna involve suspended stuff and people flying around. There are also other performances around the venue.

The highlight on 25 and 26 July is the Zouk Beatnik Picnic outdoor party (do I hear PARTY? Yeah!!!!) A number of heritage-related events will be held in museums and and vicinity, and watch out for the light installation that will paint the facades of the National Museum and the Art Museum. They’re also going to screen (the John Travolta) Hairspray and Willy Wonka (the 1971 version) outdoors, under the huge banyan tree outside the National Museum.

And.. and.. they’re all FREE!!!! And the 5 museums in the civic district (Asian Civilisation, National, Peranakan, Art, Philatelic) will be open to the public until 2.00am on both weekends the 25th, and.. and.. it’s FREE admission from 6.00pm onwards! Now how cool is that?

I picked up a pamphlet with all the performance schedule but apparently they don’t have an online version of it. The National Museum website lists the programmes but the website isn’t really that friendly – but anyway it’s better than nothing, so if you wanna know more you can visit their website then click on the Night Festival link at the bottom of the page and then click on the respective dates to view the programme line-up.

Pumping on Saturday Night

Shelly’s cousin is in town and last weekend she asked Shelly if we could take her out clubbing. I suggested that we go to either St James or MoS because those two are presumably (and are) the most well known, most happening, and biggest clubbing complexes especially for first-time clubbers in Singapore. But since most of us aren’t into too huge crowds or music that are too loud (or too “TRUNG TRUNG” – you know how those trance/ house stuff go “TRUNG TUNG TUNG TUNG TUNG TUNG TUNG TUNG”), we decided to drop by The Pump Room at Clarke Quay. They’re a bistro slash bar slash microbrewery (love the White Ale) slash club. And it’s free entry. And the music the DJs spin is pretty good. And the resident band, Jive Talkin’, kicks ass. And the band’s axe-man, Addy, kicks ass. And kinda cute. And the keyboardist plays the organ at the Cathedral. And they have a seriously huge fan on the ceiling (no kidding, the brand is: Huge Ass Fans). And the crowd’s slightly older than other hot-spots and less pretentious. And no annoying puking kids. All in all, we like the place. A year ago or so I clubbed quite often and we patronized The Pump Room quite often. After a few times we realised that the song the band play are the same 20 songs or so. They’re crowd-pleasers, tho. Those like Sweet Child of Mine, Ain’t Nobody, It’s My Life, Can’t Take my Eyes Off You (overkill Singaporean song), Rock DJ, etc. Anyway, after almost a year (?), last Saturday I kinda hoped that they’d found new songs to play. But was a bit disappointed that they’re still playing the same list of songs But we had fun nonetheless.

I’d love to hit clubs a bit more often, if only I could find more nice places and if only booze prices were much cheaper. Alcohol is just to freakin expensive in Singapore. Maybe we should just start at the local coffeeshop with those beer aunties with fanny packs and curly hair soaked in wet-look gel (is that how the chikopeks like it??), get drunk on Tiger (p*ss) and then head to the more chichi designations and pretend that we’re drunk on vodka martinis.

I’m a bad dancer, except when I’m possessed

The pre-kungfu strike and the typical Asian pose

She’s not drunk

An Eventful Weekend and More

FRIDAY

Went to the Singapore Art Museum to catch Ket Noi, a performance art event by Vietnamese and Singaporean artists. Four artists performed on Friday, started with something that involved the artist being whipped by a red scarf (missed the start, was watching this video about Giacometti in SAM), then a ‘Silent Conductor’ (or something to that effect), where the artist conducted silence, poured water into her left ear, turned her back to the audience and started howling, and then a woman’s temple where water was transported with nothing but bare hands as an offering. The last one was where art books and magazines were put into a washing machine. Also met some of Billy’s friends there, Angie, Sherman, and a few others. Also Ken, who seem to be the only ADM staff I know who attend openings. He was taking photos of people taking photos of the event.

Have you ever been in somewhere really nice and captivating and pleasant but then something/one ugly enters your field of vision and you just can’t help staring? Well, during one of the performances there was this lady who apparently wore G-string with really tight jeans. She squatted down and I happen to be standing right behind here. What happened was a bad case of plumber’s crack. When she squatted, the waist of her jeans slipped right to almost the end of her ass and we could see not only her panties’ waistband but also the (what do you call it?) vertical part of the G-string right to the end of her ass. Another millimeter and I bet her jeans would just fall off. Eyes traumatized, I went home and tried to forget all about it.

SATURDAY

It’s Ririn & Henry’s wedding in the morning, at the Bukit Batok Presbyterian Church. They’ve been going out for ever and whenever we ask her when they’re getting married, she always replied “Still very loonggggggg”. And then one day we received an invitation to their wedding, just a month before! Sneaky! And they’ve bought a flat! Which means they’ve been planning for this for long! Sneaky! So here’s us and the happy couple..

We went back to town on the train, and when we stepped into the train at Jurong East, this lady stood up from her seat and offered it to me! OMG, SHE MUST’VE THOUGHT I WAS PREGNANT!!!! I’M NOT THAT FAT! We laughed until tears rolled and I didn’t dare to turn my back and look at the lady – I assume she’s embarrassed – and we laughed some more. I dried up my tears and tried hard to stop laughing. But then Aldo was still laughing after so long. So we started laughing again. And more tears rolled.

Since there’s no training at the museum today, I met up with Billy after the wedding and went for a walk around the city. We dropped by the Arts House – which is Singapore’s former Parliament House – to check out what’s on and went into the chamber and tried to experience how it’s like to stand at the podium and talk to the whole parliament.

Then we went to the Asian Civilisation Museum. Last time I went there was maybe almost 2 years back. I remember liking it a lot, but now the place just seem so big and empty and dark and scary. But I had fun nonetheless. They have lots of interactive exhibits and we tried on costumes and learned how to play middle-eastern drum. I wanted to take pictures of the deities, but I was afraid that it works like how it works in Java’s Keratons (palaces) – your film won’t develop when you take pictures of sacred objects – I personally have never tried it but just to be on the safe side of my brand new $500 toy, I refrained from it. I found out that Jamiroquai got his inspiration from Torajan warriors:

SUNDAY

Checked out the newly opened 9km track from Mount Faber, through Henderson Wave and Hort Park. The climb up to Mount Faber from Harbourfront was grueling. It was an almost never ending staircase and that hurt my ass. Or maybe I just need more exercise for my ass. We were lucky that it didn’t rain although the sky was overcast. We could’ve resumed the walk to Kent Ridge Park, but we thought we’d had enough walking for the day and headed to Vivocity for lunch and some shopping instead. Elisa bought a Winnie the Pooh drumset for her niece in Jakarta. So then I went home and watched the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly on DVD. It was rather cheesy and it reminds me of Kill Bill. Or rather if I’d watched the Clint Eastwood flick before Kill Bill, I’d say Quentin Tarantino drew his inspiration from TGTBATU.

View from Mount Faber

Henderson Wave

@ Hort Park: this was supposed to be Dorothy from Wizard of Oz with her dog, Toto. There were other characters form the movie, too. Made out of scraps. And there’s the witch (blond!) who popped out of a field of flowers, it was successfully creepy.

MONDAY

I took Monday off to enjoy some of Singapore’s nature. We went to Pulau Ubin in the morning. By mistake we took a bus from Lavender MRT to Changi Village. Was a veerryy longgg rideeee… We didn’t have to wait for other passangers at the jetty, as it’s school holidays and quite a number of people went to Ubin. We were tired from the walk at Mt Faber the day before, so we didn’t stay too long at Ubin. It’s pretty interesting to see this side of Singapore which looks more like spectacles from road trip out from Jakarta. We cycled to Check Jawa, get some tan lines on my feet from the scorching sun, watch the crabs with huge right claws fight for women and teritorry (When they fight with their claws they make this obscene gesture.. if you watch the South Park episode where they parodied 300 you’ll get what I mean) and had lunch and cycled a bit more and fed the turtles at the temple, and we went back to Changi Village. We felt old. We had to push our bikes up steep slopes, while other people happily pedal up.. But then I like to blame it on the $8/day bike – stupid gears don’t work. Bwahahah. Or maybe cheap bikes are just not made to go up inclinations. Anyway the cycling sored up my groin. On the way back, we dropped by the WWII memorial Changi Chapel & Museum. I guess it’s the Singaporean version of Lobang Buaya. While waiting at the bus stop, we saw 3 girls brats, maybe about 13 or 14 years old, smoking and cursing, and one of them very unglamorously spitted out a string of phlegm. I felt like giving them a good kick in the face.

View from Check Jawa

Another view from Check Jawa

This is where we fed the turtles

At Changi Chapel & Museum

A Fun and Informative Saturday

Dropped by the newly opened Peranakan Museum at Armenian Street last Saturday. I can’t remember exactly how long they’ve been closed for renovation. I just remember that I liked being in the former school. It was initially another branch of the Asian Civilisation Museum but I guess they choose to make it more specialised and thus the Peranakan Museum. Honesly, I don’t know if I’m counted as a peranakan. I’m not even too sure about the family’s genealogy. But it’s definitely fun to see those things that we have at home (or keep in boxes) displayed in the museum – our TV table at home was a functioning altar until my Granpa died about 17 years back, and our house is filled with random (straits?) chinese antiquities.

Stumbled upon an interesting place – a small graveyard in the Armenian Church’s yard. Pretty interesting, since I’ve never actually seen any old Christian grave here. Small tombs arranged in 2 curves with some tombstone figures losing their extremeties, no mausoleum or whatnot. But still a nice find, afterall. And apparently the famous Vanda Miss Joaquim (namesake of the Singaporean Orchid) is buried there.

Another interesting find is the Civil Defence Gallery at the pretty (as in, beautiful) old Fire Station opposite Funan (near the Philatelic Museum). Saw some old fire engines there, including a steam-powered one. The second level was less interesting IMO, tho. Contains a replica of an ambulance’s interior, some rescue scenes (including a really boring elevator scene where all you did was look at the level-indicator lights and listen to some woman’s voice telling you that the firefighters are coming to help you at level 18), and hazmat suits.