After visiting Kinokuniya at Ngee Ann City out of the boredom of going home straight away I decide to take a walk along the length of Orchard Road and hopefully make my way to City Hall Interchange on foot, where I will transfer to the East-West line that brings me directly home. I have not had the chance to explore Orchard in full properly and note the transformations that it has undergone. I have been to Orchard on other matters but they usually take me through a short span of the thoroughfare. Most of the time - in fact, everytime - I am late and I breeze through the pavement thinking about what excuse to give when I arrive. Barely the chance to take notice of the landscape.

So I decide to take this Orchard adventure. Nothing particularly interesting though, except for some name changes and the increase in the number of lifestyle outlets. There seems to be a population explosion for them. I can't distinguish one outlet from another in terms of specialty - to me the presence of so many beverage outlet is that (1) they are alternatives for the first-choice location a customer has in mind. No space? Never mind, let's go over to that coffee joint over there... (2) again they provide alternatives, this time for the cost-conscious people - which is cheaper? (3) lastly they are alternatives in terms of seat-choice and ambience - "I like cushy seats, so let's pick this joint. The other one has hard chairs, pains my buttocks..."

At Centrepoint things begin to get more interesting. I decide to deviate from the main road and explore the older malls in the Cuppage/Koek Road area (where Starhub Centre is). Cuppage Plaza has been spruced up, it looks more chic, but the patrons who frequent the place remain the same from the old days and don't really pay much attention to the decor. It looks like what Vivo City is going to become within a few year's time...

Cross over to Orchard Plaza: this building retains its rustic flavour. Part of the mall has this huge alley that cuts through the bisection of the building, with an eatery standing in the exact middle. Through an unassuming deviation from the shops' glass panels is the dragon's gate: the tongue sliding up to the forbidding belly whose atrium you can slightly see from below. Making it even more foreboding are barriers erected in front of these escalators - the type found at the entrances of supermarkets and other large stores where the management thinks that consumers are stupid and directions to distinguish the entrance from the exits have to be provided.

At Plaza Singapura I decide to cross the road to visit Istana Park. It's been about ten years since it was first built but the place doesn't reek of age. There's something about structures built in the last two decades of the last century - time zips past and they still maintain their youthful vigour. Or perhaps it's the regular visits to the beauty parlour? Changi Airport, for one, has certainly taken to the ads. Terminal One is so unrecognisable from its stoid past, when it was first built.

Here I decide to take photos. I'm so sorry that I have been unable to take pictures of Cuppage and Orchard Plazas - the backyards of Orchard Road - for I fear the presence of a camera might invite the wrong sort of trouble...

The "floating" restaurant Giraffe



Somebody's garden? Still Istana Park. Boy if I were rich and had landed property I'd construct this kind of garden in my house. It has the foresty charm, but not that hated dense forest that we guys have to bash through while wearing green.


Urban meets nature: the portal to another world. Someone has gone in! See he parked his bicycle just outside the gateway.



The new tunnel that they sacrificed the old National Library building for. Looks like the Ten Courts of Hell thing they used to have at Paya Lebar... anyway it's instant hell if you try to walk into that thing...



Same pic, but this time focus on that slightly-off-horizontal white line through the midsection of the picture. Are your eyes playing tricks on you?


The breeze was blowing and creating ripples. Darn I should have taken this as a video instead.


The huge structure in the centre of the Park that has a secret agenda: to hang national flags. That's its contribution to nation-building.



The best-looking construction crane I've ever seen...


The ripples on the water. Again should have taken this as a video.


This is a bad shot. Look on the brighter side: it's like an impressionist painting

Unforunately I couldnt' complete the foot journey to City Hall as I am due home already, so I take the train from Dhoby Ghaut instead. I would have liked to walk along Stamford Road, past the dragon's mouth, the church, the YMCA and the new National Museum.

Another time then.