one of our early road to singapore walks, in march 2015. wrote this soon after the walk. punggol apparently means “hurling sticks at the branches of fruit trees to bring them down to the ground” in malay. it also may refer to a wholesale market for fruits and vegetables. i had never heard of this area in the northeast of singapore till one day someone spoke of the wonderful seafood you get out there. a couple of years later, i…
i don’t know what exactly is art, but if it’s something that makes you stop, stare, feel a strange attraction and look at a thing differently, then this was definitely art. it made me want to go close, touch the thing. on lavender street that day, the sun blazing, traffic going by at its usual weekday pace, i couldn’t look away from that burst of colours and intriguing shapes. what was it? what was it doing here? shouldn’t it be…
had we not been trying our best to avoid the cemetery, we’d never have found it. the rain had been heavy, it was never quite gone the entire day. aj and i set out to walk around seven in the evening, light was falling fast. the traffic was thick and noisy along queensway, the first left from my place. to avoid it, we crossed the road, walked a little along commonwealth avenue, then took an unfamiliar path going in the…
i kept feeling i was walking on hallowed ground. this is where the different and defiant lived. this is where a city often viewed as not really democratic, said… you know what, people have a choice. hougang, the second longest held opposition ward in singapore. ever since 1991, when the workers’ party’s low thia khiang won the seat, this single member constituency has given its vote to the other guy. aj was excited, it’s not often you get to visit…
irrelevance. as i thought of the unused train track this morning, that’s the word that finally floated up and seemed to have meaning. i’d been thinking for some time of our walk on saturday, we’d decided to go to clementi toward the west and explore. when i searched clementi on the net it took me straight to something i’d not heard of before… steel truss bridge. the pictures showed an abandoned old rusty bridge made of angular metal structures that…