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You’ve probably seen this intro at the start of every Tally Ho piece:
I can hear you wondering: Who are the Adventure Crew? Fear not, dear reader, for I have the answers! In brightest day, in darkest night, no adventure shall escape our sight
So I was at the second day of the Embrace The Now, the *SCAPE Launch Festival. Just like the first, it was pretty awesome, although I couldn’t stay for all of it ): There are some more pictures of what I missed at their Facebook page, so do look at that to see what I don’t have here! :D Some of the photos are by Seriously Sarah because mine didn’t come out properly (:
Long story short: I had an awesome day at Embrace The Now, the *SCAPE Launch Festival! *SCAPE, if you’re not familiar with it, is a brand-new youth shopping mall and lifestyle centre. It used to be an open field, but they’re launching the brand-new shiny mall over the weekend. This is the first day, and I’m so sad I couldn’t stay to watch all of the acts at the main stage ): Check out their Facebook page for the latest updates and pictures. The folks over there are really great at updating stuff, so there’s pretty much always something new to see. These are pictures from just the first day! :D A quick competition update! I saw this in the back of True Singapore Ghost Stories 20, which you can find at most local bookstores. Angsana Books, an imprint of Flame of the Forest Publishing, is offering S$2,000/RM4,000 in cash and other prizes for short ghost stories. Here’s what it says in the back of the book:
You can send in photos or illustrations, which may be published as well. You can send in as many entries as you want through snail mail or email. The address: Russell Lee Angsana Books Flames Of The Forest Publishing Pte Ltd Blk 5 Ang Mo Kio Industrial Park 2A #07-22/23, AMK Tech II Singapore 567760 Email: RussellLee@ flameoftheforest.com They recommend that you include your name, age, gender, address, phone numbers (home and mobile), school and/or occupation. Pick up the book for more details and terms! There’s no deadline in the ad, but best if you send it in early!
The Adventure Crew asked ourselves: We can has picnic? And we answered: Yes we can! And so it was that we resolved to go to Marina Barrage to have a lovely little picnic. Except the weather was very wet. But because we’re the Adventure Crew, we decided to take a gamble with the weather anyway!
 Just keep swimming, just keep swimming... (Photo courtesy SeriouslySarah.com) And we won! It was probably the first day in the week that it hadn’t rained when we headed down to Marina Barrage :D We would’ve walked to the Barrage in our joy, but there’s a lot of construction going on so there’s no way to actually walk from the Marina Bay mrt station to the Barrage. So we had to take a big loop around to find a very weirdly-placed bus-stop. There are two buses; one is a shuttle, the other is a normal bus. I’m not sure which is which, but I think we took the normal bus there and the shuttle back. At any rate, it’s about 15 minutes from station to Barrage. Once you walk into the Barrage itself, you get treated to some lovely views:  Inside the first floor of the Barrage, with the second level visible and Marina Bay Sands in the background And because it was such a clear day, we could see quite far out. That was really rather nice (: Some background on the Barrage: it was opened in 2008, and serves as the most glorified dam I’ve ever seen (not that that’s a bad thing). It’s a reservoir and a floodgate at the same time, as well as a sort of public park. Sort of. We took advantage of the park-ness of it, and found a spot in the shade to unpacked our picnic stuff!  Drink, sushi, curry puffs, bagels, cookies, and potato salad We ended up with a lot more food than we’d expected, heh! But s’okay. I had cornflakes in my potato salad, which I find incredibly weird, but it tasted good. After we ate, we went up to the second level and attempted to fly our kites. My cheapo $3 plastic kite broke in about two minutes ): I fixed it, then it broke again, and I gave up on it. Mintea’s kite kept breaking too, so after a while, we went downstairs to buy a kite for ourselves. I bought a proper cloth kite and string from the shop ($14). A bit expensive, but it’s a pretty sturdy kite. They have lots of kites in varying sizes. I bought the smallest one, and it was pretty big!  Woohoo! Because the Barrage isn’t surrounded by tall buildings, you get some amazing wind up there. But a note to all kiters: bring lots and lots of sunblock, a pair of shades, and a hat. I ended up horribly sunburnt on one arm ): Not enough to be all peely and icky, but enough to hurt. The weather was a bit too good, and we didn’t stay up there for too long because it was just too hot. To cool down, we went into the gallery. It was quite dark inside, so I don’t have a lot of pictures.  Section talking about the Singapore River The whole gallery is dedicated to Singapore’s attempts at building a sustainable urban country, so it’s all about the environment. Some of the exhibits were really very interesting, and they talked about things like the 80s cleanup of the Singapore River. (Before my time, but I’ve heard stories of how horrifyingly dirty it used to be.)  Inside the gallery Entry to the gallery is free, and it’s a really interesting way to learn about the environment and the government’s efforts in maintaining it. My favorite part was towards the end, where they have a fully working scale module of the Marina Barrage itself. There are demonstrations on how it works every half an hour or so I think, and we were just in time to catch it.  A bird's eye view of the complex (top), with the floodgates (bottom) Basically, the Marina Barrage works as such:
Excess water also gets pumped out through the pump side, but that’s in extreme cases. It was really cool to watch, and it’s easy to understand. We all went “ooooh” when it started to ‘rain’, heh. The gallery is very large, so do take your time to explore it! And as we headed out, I had to take a photo with Water Wally, the PUB’s water mascot!  Water Wally! :D
The Royal Selangor showroom-shop at Clarke Quay hides a very cool secret: the School of Hard Knocks, a little pewter workshop that anyone can sign up for. They’re open for walk-ins, but it’s best if you call or email ahead if you have a big group just in case. It was the Adventure Crew with Arrch, who was going back to Australia that night!
For something free! The NLB Book Exchange is back again this year. Bring your used books down to any NLB library from 10 to 23 April to exchange them for coupons. Then, on April 24, go down to the main library at Victoria Street to get books that other people have exchanged. All for free! Here’s a copy-n-paste from GoLibrary:
There will be a Borders Fair at the Singapore Expo at the end of the month. Details below! Venue: Singapore Expo Hall 6B I remember last year’s event had a selection of books that wasn’t half-bad, but it does get very crowded on the weekend. There’ll also be a selection of other events happening within the Borders Fair on Saturday and Sunday, including storytelling by kid’s fiction group Monsters Under The Bed. There’s some more info at the Expo calendar (source of the picture above, too) and more about the events at the Borders website.
Tally-Ho is a semi-regular column of my adventures with the Adventure Crew (and sometimes other people). We figured that Singapore can’t be all that boring, and are determined to show other folks how fun Singapore can be… if you know where to look.
I like seafood. Or, rather, I like eating seafood. And, as they say, the taste of victory is sweet – and what’s sweeter than really fresh prawns? So it was on a drizzly Saturday afternoon that I met several members of the Adventure Crew — Mintea, Avariel and Sarah — to head to Bottle Tree Park for prawning!
Because, you see, when you go out and catch fish, it’s called fishing. When you go out to catch prawns, it’s called prawning. The logic, it hurts my brain!
Tally-Ho is a semi-regular column of my adventures with the Adventure Crew (and sometimes other people). We figured that Singapore can’t be all that boring, and are determined to show other folks how fun Singapore can be… if you know where to look. This is where I was today:
I was at the National Museum of Singapore to go to the Quest for Immortality – The World of Ancient Egypt exhibition. Alone, le gasp! Because the Adventure Crew has to work or go to school, and I run on a different calendar than them. Adult admission to Quest for Immortality is $15, but I got in free because I’m a student. The exhibition runs until April 4, so there isn’t much time left to see the artefacts! The 200+ pieces are from the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Museum of Art History) in Vienna. Here’s a summary:
The exhibition isn’t so much about mummies than I’d expected; it’s more about the symbolism and meaning that the Ancient Egyptians attached to the items they used in their elaborate and extensive burial rituals. It’s quite refreshing to see the various artefacts put into their cultural context, rather than just being interesting objects on display. Basically, the Ancient Egyptians believed that dying was just transiting to another state of being; the afterlife was just another form of existence, very similar to the flesh and blood state of living. They mummified the bodies because the ba, which is the non-corporeal state of being (not the soul – that’s the ka) would perish without having a physical body to return to. But yes. Pictures! Plus a sorta-kinda-not really walkthrough. (Read more) |
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