It was a later start today, the previous day of no sleep and straight to touring the city really took it out of me. Started the day with Wade taking me for lunch at the 'Scissors Curry', a local indian eatery that is close to the where Wade lives that uses a pair of scissors to cut up your meats or other ingredients before you mix in your rice and curry. Was pretty good, not too hot at all.
My destination today was the Marina Barrage, a building I had spotted f
rom the top of the Singapore Flyer the previous day.
It's located at the mouth of the river here, with dual duties of flood control and turning the water in the bay from salt to fresh over time. The barrage itself is impressive, if fairly standard, but it's the building that houses the pumps that's impressive. The grass roof sweeps around and down a central courtyard that houses fountains and sculptures
with children going berserk through said fountains. The building is mostly over the water, and has a cafe (awesome chocolate milkshake to be had) an educational history on water supply of Singapore, with a scale working model of
the barrage, and almost the best part of all, it's all air conditioned!
The roof is grassed and it's overrun with families, kids, couples and tourists. Quite a few people were flying kites from there, most absentmindedly, but interesting to see regardless. I got some great photos of the shipping moored off in the ocean, as well as the city, though it was a bit hazy with the rain about to roll in.
Speaking of rain, I made my way across the barrage and got 'stranded' halfway by a heavy downpour. After about 10 minutes it stopped, and I continued on to look at the boat lift, and as I was walking back, I noticed by looking at the water surface, that it was raining on one side of the barrage on not on the other. I picked up my pace but I still got wet on th
e last section of the barrage as I ran into the building for shelter.
The land around the Marina Barrage is currently being developed into a parkland, so it's earthworks and half finished buildings everywhere. There's whole fields of full grown trees in 'pots' that no doubt are to be transplanted into the new park lands. I've seen one of two like this before, but never on the scale or number that I saw here.
I caught the MRT (subway) back into the city central, killing time looking through the shops there, and met up with Wade and Athene at the Clarke Quay station for dinner. We went to their favourite place for crab, although in the end we never did get the crab, filling up on everything else, as well as the restaurant being slack and not bringing it out on time. We did have prawns in shell with some sort of crunchy, spicy coating I quite liked, a tofu dish with mushroom and something else I'm now not sure what it was, but it was good.
After dinner we had a look around Clarke Quay in full, it's a restaurant/tourist district and was bustling. It also has a giant slingshot and swing attraction, which we amused ourselves to the terrified riders for a while.
We got a taxi back to the apartment and that was the day done.
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