Singapore Night Scenes

I had to leave Indonesia in the middle of my divemaster training in order to renew my visa, having inadvertently entered the country with a 30-day visa that couldn’t be renewed.  Actually, this turned out to be a good thing, as it provided for an interesting break from Labuan Bajo.  Tibo, a fellow divemaster in training, had the same type of visa, and since our divemaster training was taking two months we had to leave the country for a bit and come back in with new visas.  Tibo flew to Kuala Lumpur and back, spending the night in the airport.  I decided to explore Singapore for a few days – it wasn’t that long a flight, and I’d never been there before.  It’s a prosperous city-state with a population of about 5.6 million (one of the highest population densities in the world), located at the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsula.  All the maritime trade that developed between the Far East and South Asia and the Middle East had to round the peninsula at this point.

I was really impressed with Singapore’s public amenities, history, and mass transit systems, and spent a large portion of my time in some excellent museums.  The paintings in the National Gallery Singapore by artists at work during the period after World War II were especially interesting and beautiful to me – as were the Asian Civilizations Museum’s exhibits showing the confluence of trade and religions in Singapore.

In this post I’m sharing photographs that I took over the course of several evenings while wandering around the streets, relaxing on the roof-top terrace of the National Gallery overlooking the city, and checking out Singapore’s Chinatown neighborhood on a Saturday night.  Chinatown was a great place for evening photography, as there was a lot of street action with vendors and food stalls.  There’s a long stretch of street, dubbed Chinatown’s Food Street, that is protected with metal and glass canopies that rise above the roofs of the 3-4 story buildings that line the street.  It’s an all-weather dining mecca that’s filled with permanent kitchen kiosks and seating.  The little kitchen stalls have windows all round, so you can view and watch the cooking action – lots of fun!  A great place to order some skewers of satay and people watch.