Day Two: Subway mazes & Asian Civilizations Museum

Today, Robby left us to go to his doctoral consortium workshop at Nanyang University in the far east side of Singapore. Atticus & I took a 5-hour excursion to the Asian Civilizations Museum. Through the Sun-Tec Convention Center, we walked through an underground mall to the City Hall MRT station. There were plenty of elevators in the MRT station, but through the underground mall, I had to prop up the stroller many times to get up & down escalators. That was tiring! The City Hall station seemed far from our hotel, & the underground mall was just a maze of bakeries, cafes, & women's clothing and make-up stores.

From the City Hall MRT station we went towards Marina Bay & got off at the next stop, Raffles Place. The Asian Civilizations Museum was right across the water. Atticus was not too eager to get started on the exhibit. He fussed around until he reminded me that I was hungry for lunch, so we went directly to the museum cafe & had a light lunch.

The museum ($8 for adults) was a comprehensive and informational museum on the Asian ethnic groups that occupy Southeast Asian, from the Dayaks of Borneo to the Mughals of India to the principles of Chinese societies to the 5 pillars of Islam. Each ethnic group was represented in a gallery full of artifacts, clothing, jewelry, & interactive free-standing television screens where the busts of individuals from each group would answer questions through a video. Their head was as big as the screen itself. When no one was watching these screens, the faces of the guides would appear idly singing or murmuring or looking around. That was a little spooky.

I wish I had more time with each exhibit in the museum. With the baby, I felt constantly pressed for time. Instead of slowly reading each display, I wandered from one to another, hoping that the moving stroller would please him. On the whole, he was very well behaved considering he had sat in the stroller for all 5 hours.

Did you know that "tet" in vietnamese means the node between the segments of bamboo? It symbolizes the changes of seasons. & did you know that there is an indigenous tribe in borneo that has a headhunting tradition?

Okay, that's all I remember!


In the photo above, Atticus wears a turban from the Indian Gallery.