Sunday 17 June 2001 – Singapore
Spent a quiet morning catching up on diary and emails. Walked down to Orchard Road for my now ritual coffee and papers at Starbucks (well, it’s the only café society readily available in Singapore…)
Went to the Gym and then decided to try the Albert Mall Dumpling Festival again – there still weren’t that many stalls, but I did try another dumpling, again delicious, although they’re pretty solid and you wouldn’t want to eat them all the time.
As it was near Bugis Village, I decided to have a good look around there as the day wasn’t too hot. Bugis Village used to be the ‘sin’ centre of Singapore, full of brothels and transvestites strutting their stuff, until the place was cleaned up and turned into a food court with a flea market in the interests of ‘hygiene’ by the authorities. No more transvestites now.
Whilst there I noticed a sort of ‘sex shop’ – not something you see a lot of in Singapore – so I decided to go in for a stickybeak. It was a bit tragic – stock was limited to novelty condoms and edible undies! Not a vibrator in sight, let alone a dirty magazine.
Attended a concert by the Zurich Symphony Orchestra in the evening – they are a little bigger than the TSO (66 players, running 14-10-8-6-4, double winds), but similar in scale and performance standard – not great, but not bad, although I’d heard poor reports of their concert the previous night.
