3055 Two stalls in the Tiong Bahru market. Closest to us Hainese Chicken. As you can see they only have 9 dishes. One is Char Sieu (BBQ Pork), one is meat (here that means beef), one is vegetables in oyster sauce and the remaining 6 are chicken done in different ways. The one farther away is a braised duck stand. Sort of like Peking duck but in Singapore.
3093 This is Diana at the cross looking down on the Kranji War Cemetery. You can see the headstones on the right. The buildings in the distance are in Indonesia and the Straits of Johore start just beyond the trees.
3106 Peach Garden lunch. If you look carefully at the right side of the plate, the item closest to the spoon’s handle is one large piece of dried red chili.
3112 This is the temple where the scene took place.
3131 This is the gable with the pipa player and the peacock. The carved and painted surfaces under the eaves are beautiful.
3140 This is a typical gable dragon at the Bright Hill Temple Complex.
Oct 26 – Singapore. The tour we’ve taken today will get us outside the city of Singapore and around the rest of the island. We’ve been here twice and have never see anything outside the city.
Our tour started at the Tiong Bahru market. It’s a modern building with two floors. The bottom floor is a ‘wet’ market where the locals can buy daily groceries, vegetables, fruit, etc. The second floor is a ‘hawker center’. Some years ago Singapore started to worry about the cleanliness of street hawkers that sold food so they outlawed them. The developed hawker centers where the vendors could open a little shop and sell the same items they sold on the street. Seems to have worked pretty well. It’s pretty early in the morning and this one is already very busy. Not all the vendors are open but those who are have customers. It works like a mall’s food court. There are community tables in the center and windowed vending spaces around the edges. The individual shops are only about 6-7 feet across but this is probably luxurious to someone who used to have a cart to push around the city. Each hawker seems to specialize in a certain kind of food, fish balls, hot & cold beverages, prawn mee, Hainaise chicken, soup, baked goods or chilled bean curd. My personal favorite was ‘Koh Brothers Pig’s Organ Soup.’ Bet that’s got your mouth watering. The food smelled delicious and for the most part looked good as well. And the price was certainly right for $5Singapore you could get more food than you’d probably want to eat.
Our next destination was the northern part of the island and the Straits of Johore. These straits separate Indonesia from Singapore. They’re only about a mile wide here and this is where the Japanese Advance Boats crossed in 1942 to invade the island. The Kranji War Memorial is on the banks of the strait up a gently sloping hill. Like all WWII cemeteries the ranks of stark white headstones are in strict military formation. More than 20,000 men and women are commemorated on the site but there are only graves for a fraction of that number. Many of the bodies were never recovered because the Japanese were not interested in facilitating that task after the British surrendered.
Many of the soldiers were Australians and New Zealanders but I believe the majority were Indian, Malay Hong Kongese and other British subjects scattered throughout the region. Names include Singh, Kan, Haidar, Chuin, Hwa, Seng, Yong, Tong and Wang. They were vastly outnumbered and definitely out maneuvered.
I spent some time at the memorial reading headstones and wondering what each man had left behind. My own encounter with the past a couple of days ago still fresh in my mind. I don’t know if I would view all this differently if I had not had my own experiences in the military. I believe I would because my frame of reference would not be at all the same. I guess someone said it pretty well when they commented, “You had to be there.”
Lunch was at a very busy restaurant, the Peach Garden. It was Chinese cuisine and there were way more Chinese people there than tourists. The food was good and I was lucky enough to sit with a bunch of picky eaters. More of the good stuff for me. One dish was sautéed shrimp and cuttlefish with celery. The shrimp disappeared pretty quickly but I got plenty of calamari. It was very good. One other dish that was even better and not very popular was the Diced Chicken with Dried Red Chilies and Cashew nuts. It was really only medium warm but everyone complained about how hot it was and I made that my main meal. Diana ate it too but didn’t chew the dried chilies but rather pushed them aside.
I like to call cooking with dried chilies ‘Kamikaze Stir Fry’. The chilies give up some of their heat to the oil used to fry the food and that makes it pleasantly warm. But if you chew the dried chilies as you eat the chicken you get a surprise. Because they are dried you can chew the heck out of them and nothing happens…at first. Once the chilies have a chance to reconstitute absorbing the liquids in your mouth they unleash a big burst of heat all over your mouth at exactly the same time. Most restaurants in the US dice the dried chilies very small but here they had some very large chunks that could easily be avoided. However, if you chewed one, it was way too late to do anything about it but eat a large quantity of plain white, steamed rice because it will absorb the chili oil and give you some relief. Of course, the same people who passed on the squid and chewed the chilies were not about to eat that clumpy dumb Chinese rice. I let them suffer in silence, their suffering, my silence. Water and oil don’t mix so you can drink all the water you want and it won’t put a significant dent in the heat. Since I like the extra heat I judiciously picked some small chunks to eat space widely apart.
Right next to the Peach Garden was something called the Orchid Bowl. Was it a restaurant that specialized in rice bowls with flowers? NO! It was a typical US style bowling alley. It has a very high tech scoring system that even tells you the speed of the last ball you rolled in kilometers per hour. What a crack up. It wasn’t very busy at this time of day but there were two groups of lanes in action. The one nearest too me was obviously family bowling time with an emphasis on the kids. Very cool.
Next we invaded the Bright Hill Temple. I say invaded because I’m on a bus with some of what could be called ugly Americans but they’re really just clueless and thoughtless tourists. They’ll barge in anywhere, camera first, noisily disturbing everyone around them. I try to keep ahead of them because once they set the tone at a site everyone else is suspect too. So here we are at a temple site and the first building we see is a very large memorial temple dedicated to the past abbot. We’ve been in the Orient since October 2 and made many stops but what to these idiots do. They rush headlong into the temple talking to each other a mile a minute, snapping pictures right and left until one of the temple’s staff gave them a royal chewing out. Which they richly deserved. First of all they didn’t take their shoes off, and they should have known better and even if they didn’t know there were signs at every door. I’ve seen these same people at other Buddhist sites. Second, people were inside praying. We may not ascribe to their theology, but it’s their place of worship and we should respect that. I hadn’t even gone inside but had taken some pictures, no flash, from the rear doorway. They lady who jumped the idiots had smiled at me earlier when I gave her a little bow. She was in no mood to smile just a few minutes later and I couldn’t blame her.
The Hong Choon Memorial Temple is beautiful on the outside and very plain for the most part on the inside. The exceptions are the altars and Buddhas themselves. The temples in this complex have golden roofs with very ornate gables. Fanciful dragons run rampant on the ends of almost every gable. Some are adorned with flowers or fish. The columns are covered with carved and painted figures of dragons and clouds. It’s hard to describe but the overall effect is beautiful.
The Hall of Great Strength has the usual dragons on the gables of its highest roof but the lower room has a pipa player standing at the edge and a peacock further in. As usual the eaves and columns are brightly painted and ornately carved. The dragons are finely executed and are covered with hair or spines all down their lateral sides.
One interesting structure that was not a temple was the Hall of Precepts. It’s called that because it’s here that the priests and nuns are given their ‘precepts’, the guidelines given by Buddha that are to guide the lives of those who wish to live a peaceful life while contributing to the happiness of society. They’re important because it’s only through diligent application of these precepts that one develops a clear and peaceful mind, which together with mental development and wisdom is the only way to be delivered from Samsara (The unending cycle of birth and death).
It’s presided over by Rocana Buddha, who represents the Bliss Body that is the reward of a Buddha. It represents absolute truth. (Did I mention that anyone can become a Buddha if you get the program right.) He’s surrounded by four great Bodhisattvas who embody the four aspects of enlightened beings, great compassion (Lord Avalokiteshvara), great wisdom (Lord Manjushira), great vows (Lord Ksitigarbha) and great practice (Lord Samantabhadra). Say that three times fast! These are surrounded by eight Vajrakumuras. These fierce looking guardians represent the Noble Eightfold Path that reminds Buddhists to walk with strength and diligence.
After strolling around the temple grounds and viewing the stupa-topped Pagoda of 10,000 Buddhas, we headed for the bus. A stupa looks sort of like a hand bell. They’re often golden but can be white or made from colored stone.
Our last stop of the day was the Changi Chapel and Museum. It tells the story of the Changi Prisoner of War camp run by the Japanese to hold the people they captured when taking Singapore. It’s a lot like any museum you’ll see of the Holocaust in Germany. Prisoners just skin and bones, worked and starved to death. It’s a sad place with an oddly uplifting feel. In the midst of all that suffering the prisoners put on stage shows, had sing-alongs and worshiped in make shift chapels. One poignant is a reconstruction of one of the little open ended chapels that is a reconstruction of Saint Paul’s Church. On the altar of the reconstruction is a relic of the prison. It’s a cross that one of the prisoners, Sergeant Harry Stogden, made it from the metal of spent artillery shells and small pieces of steel. It was engraved by others and someone even added Harry’s name. Unfortunately Sgt. Stogden was sent to work in the Japanese coal mines and the harsh conditions plus the Beri Beri he suffered took a toll on his health. He died aboard a US hospital ship shortly after being rescued when the war ended.
The pastor of these small churches, Rev. Eric Cordingley, carried Harry’s cross with him as he started new churches after being sent to work on the Thailand-Burma Railroad, think Bridge on the River Kwai. At the end of the war he took the cross back to the UK. Harry’s family knew little about his wartime experiences until his son read an article about the cross in 1997. By that time Rev. Cordingley’s daughter had already sent the cross back to Singapore. When this museum opened in 2001 Harry’s son came to the celebration and placed his dad’s cross on the altar of the reconstructed chapel where it stands today. An amazing story.
After that it was back to the ship to get cleaned up and head out to dinner in Singapore. We tried to go to a hawker center to eat but the one we wanted to go to was closed for renovation. So we walked to the Esplanade and took in the view of Singapore and the Merlion from there. There’s some sort of dance festival going on and two dance troupes were performing along the Esplanade. The dances were very stylized in the Malay-Thai-Indonesian style. Lots of fun to watch.
We had dinner at an excellent Thai restaurant in the Esplanade center. Diana picked green curry seafood and I picked Thai noodles with chicken and peanuts. We shared them and they were great. For desert we had sticky rice with mango and coconut sauce. Really yummy!!! Then it was taxi back to the ship. An easy going, thought provoking and enjoyable day. I love Singapore. People gripe about all the rules (You can’t even bring chewing gum off the ship and they don’t sell it in Singapore. Possession of it is a crime.) but I like it because of the rules. It’s a clean, safe, well organized place to enjoy yourself. Only drawback is that since it’s only one degree off the Equator, it’s always hot and usually humid.
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