Tropical Punch Tour: Singapore Part 4
Friday, June 25, 2010
Fort Canning and Clarke Quay, Singapore
This day was absolutely full of delightful surprises for my eyes and ears. A few minutes after I walked outside, an old lady in her 60s bummed some change off of me and we chatted for a while. She recommended that I explore Fort Canning, and since it was just a short walk down the road, that’s exactly what I did. It’s basically a big park on one of Singapore’s few hills that contains some relics from its time as a military installation, plus a nature walk through some botanical gardens, lots of big exotic trees, and a main building that houses various businesses and art galleries. I saw one art show there featuring wooden sculpture that took place in two small rooms, one painted all white called the White Studio; and the Black Box, a jet black room with a few rows of seats stacked up theatre-style in the back. It wouldn’t be very difficult at all to imagine Keiji Haino putting on a performance in that space.
Next, I strolled through the Spice Garden botanical gardens, and as I arrived on the other side of Fort Canning at dusk, I was greeted by a rad old lighthouse and an amazing three-layer burrito of sound that consisted of a kid playing an acoustic guitar accompanied by a bunch of cicadas chirping and frogs croaking. The latter bellowed a seriously mesmerizing, staggered drone from deep down inside a drainage culvert. It sounded so much better than most music made by humans, I wanted to record it so bad! I sat on the ground and listened to it closely for quite a while.
As I walked down a lighted brick walkway and exited Fort Canning, I came upon Clarke Quay, a popular area for dining and drinking. There, I watched people get hucked a couple of hundred feet straight up into the air on a gigantic reverse bungie sling and others get hoisted straight up to the same height and get suddenly dropped on a giant pendulum swing. The day’s final piece of eye candy came in the form of a bunch of radio-controlled kites adorned with really bright, colorful lights that flitted, swooped, banked and looped in the most unnatural, un-aerodynamic way, it looked quite astonishing. Yeah, today really was was filled with a bunch of rad, random, unexpected stuff. Awesome possum.
Roll over photos for captions.
All words and photos ©2010 Arcane Candy.
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