Rooftop garden
Chinatown is full of these cool colonial buildings
The Hindu temple
Chinese medicine shop
Sea cucumbers. Yum!
You can buy coconuts and drink the water out of it. High in potassium!
Risa with her coconut
Can you see the little gecko?
Outside the temple
Entrance after the courtyard
The main chamber
Offerings that you could buy
Monks, this one had a wooden bell in front of him.
The walls were lined with Buddhas.
This was the guy leading the ceremony. You can see a singing bowl (?) sitting in from of him.
Drum
More Buddhas
Giant Buddha
More offerings
Giant Buddha from the side
Akasagarbha, the protector of those born in the year of the Ox
Giant temple block, also known as a wooden fish
More Buddhas and offerings
Giant version of the singing bowl
Buddha and a stone relief in the ante-chamber
The ceiling had dozens of lanterns
There were these stalls that specialized in chopsticks. They would have dozens to a hundred different types. I got some Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Chip & Dale, and Angry Birds chopsticks for the kids.
We shopped, gawked and wandered through Chinatown. We got there pretty early in the morning and the only thing we could find for breakfast was a shop that sold dim sum and had these huge egg tarts that were fresh from the oven. Sooooo good. I shopped for gifts and souvenirs among the stalls. I remember Chinatown being bigger, so either it seemed bigger because I was younger or it's shrunk. It's about four streets full of stalls and some restaurants. All the prices are displayed and there's no haggling. But stalls will usually have the same prices with the exceptions of some of the stalls nearer the entrance might be slightly higher.
The only stall owner that was grumpy was a woman with Chinese calligraphy that said things like "dumb ass" and "uptight". I wanted to take a picture, but she wouldn't let me after she figured out I wasn't going to buy any.
For lunch we went to a hawker center located in the People's Complex behind the Chinatown MRT. It was enormous, and afterwards I found out there was a second floor. After navigating the crazy amount of people (it was right at lunchtime and this center seemed very popular with the locals), Risa settled on some veggies and rice from a Chinese lunch counter and I got Hainanese Chicken Rice, the unofficial dish of Singapore. Forgot to get pictures as usual.
Building with cool different coloured shutters
Clarke Quay
Those weird umbrella things house jets that blow downward to cool pedestrians.
The view of the river from the bridge
Beautiful buildings leftover from the colonial times.
Chinatown at night; my camera takes lousy night pictures.
We went back to Chinatown because I wanted to pick up a chess set for Justin that I'd seen earlier and I wanted to visit the Maxwell hawker center because I'd read from a few blogs that it was one of the best in Singapore. It turned out to be a big bust. Half the stalls were closed before we got there (at like 7 at night) and about half the remaining stalls closed while we were trying to figure out what to get. There was some really good dim sum there, but the rest of the food was okay at best. Not as good as the hawker center at Holland Village (my favourite).
The doors to the Hindu temple at night.
"Dry" Shanghai beef, called dry because it has a sauce but it's not a soup. You can also see carrot cake and a scallion pancake in the background.
Roti (you might have noticed by now that I like roti a little bit) and a curry dip
Indian chicken curry, I didn't like it very much
Siu mai and ha gow-that siu mai was seriously the best I've ever had.
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