"Look," I said, pointing out the sign on the front gate to Eliza. "This is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. How's that on a scale of 1 to 10 for grand prom gestures?"
"That's, like, 100," said Eliza. "Chris, you really are killing it with this exotic Asia thing."
"Actually, I never realized it," said Jerilyn. "For me, this used to be a place where we came to feed bread to the swans. Last time there was a food centre across the road at Taman Serasi, but it closed some years back. In Singapore, things change very fast. Sometimes too fast. Like, for example, this gate used to be black colour and they didn't have the gift shop and food court inside. If you come back in two, three years, there will be things you won't recognize already."
That felt unsettling; my family had lived in the same house for five generations, and I would become the third generation of Brandons to attend the Air Force Academy if I got in. Most of the kids I'd gone to kindergarten with still attended the same high school as I had, and the Middleton family had been just down the street since forever. Jack Middleton always knew what type of candy was trending each year and doled it out in generous portions; even after I'd long outgrown trick-or-treating, he still saved copious amounts of it for Al and me. I liked it when things stayed the same long enough to really sear themselves into my consciousness, just as I hoped to memorize every movement, every word, every look of Eliza before she went away. Not having her in my life at all, not even as a non-girlfriend, would be the biggest change I'd ever had to deal with, and I was absolutely dreading it.
Holding a huge golf umbrella over our heads to shield Eliza from the sun, we made our way down the path, towards a pond with swans gliding on it. Apparently, someone had agreed with me that old could be good, because they said this was the oldest ornamental water feature in Singapore, dating from 1866. We could walk right up to the concrete edge, close enough that if it hadn't been strictly forbidden (and would have ruined our clothing besides), we could take off our shoes and dip our toes into the water. Peering down into the calm, blackish depths, we could see turtles and schools of bright orange fish swimming just below the surface. The Singapore we'd seen so far was all concrete and no wildlife, so finding a pond full of it, a man-made one no less, right next to a busy city intersection felt like an oxymoron, but a good one.
They'd snapped a bunch of candid shots with us strolling along the side of the Swan Lake (which was what that man-made pond was called), as well as a posed shot at the little gazebo at the side of the water with fancy iron pillars. It was kind of crazy how you could find Victorian architecture in the places where you least expected it, even though Singapore exuded such hyper-modernity that it made Colorado Springs feel sleepy and backward by comparison even when I knew it wasn't really. There was a bigger Victorian-style gazebo called the Bandstand, which of course was the perfect backdrop for a posed picture on the expanse of lawn surrounding it, as well as a closer shot of us standing on its steps. I wondered how it would feel to spread a blanket out on the lawn and picnic to the backdrop of a chamber orchestra or a brass band, if only it wasn't so muggy outside. If I could transport the dry Colorado summer air to this garden, that wouldn't be so bad, but as it was, we were being steamed alive. Farther down the path, there was another man-made lily pond with a floating stage shaped like a giant oyster. They called this the Symphony Stage, where, it seemed, classical music concerts were performed, with a statue of Chopin at his piano on the top of a slope watching it.
"I think we missed the orchids," I said. "Can we go take a look at them?"
"You need to pay money to get in," said Jerilyn. "We'll wait for you outside."
The idea of three thousand varieties of orchids was mind-boggling. I'd figured out an orchid was a purple flower, and I'd read that it was Singapore's national flower, but I had not expected the concept of an orchid to be a continuum of shades and sizes, all nestled among dense, lush greenery. The person who'd designed this garden had evidently thought about how to help all the foreigners coming here cope with the heat (or maybe it was about helping the orchids cope with the heat too?) because there were tree-shaded paths, green arches, and mist sprays throughout the outdoor areas. In the middle of the area, they had a "VIP Orchid Garden", where they'd created different types of orchids for all kinds of famous people. All along, we thought we were advocates of diversity and inclusion by influencing our classmates to give girls and minority kids their fair share of leadership positions on class committees and project groups, especially Eliza who said if she wanted everyone else to think of her as mainstream despite having spent more than a third of her life battling a life-threatening illness, she had to believe everyone else who was different should belong in the mainstream too. But when we knew barely a third of the names of the people whom they'd created new types of orchids for, we had to admit we hadn't done diversity all that well. We knew Princess Diana, William and Kate, Serena Williams, Elton John, Kofi Annan, and Nelson Mandela, of course, but who was Yingluck Shinawatra? Or Stefanie Sun, or Yip Pin Xiu?
"Wow, they actually honoured a Paralympian with an orchid," said Eliza, reading the sign. "I thought I was doing a decent job at living my best life, but here's someone who's been physically wasting away her whole life, and still breaking world records and winning gold medals. That makes me feel so ashamed of myself."
"You always said it would be a win if you could just have a normal life," I said. "Well, that's an exceptional I wouldn't wish on anybody, but it does show exceptional doesn't have to be bad. I'd rather take normal any day, though."
Of course, I did; wearing glasses wasn't abnormal per se although it had made all the kids look at me as if I was an alien on the first day of kindergarten. Naturally, I gravitated to the other kid in my class who was visibly different, who happened to be Eliza because she had no hair back then, and the rest was history. Honestly, I probably was the most vanilla kid in my high school, not doing drugs, not hooking up, getting a passing grade on all my tests, and almost making it to Eagle Scout, though I wouldn't get to finish it now that I wouldn't be doing senior year in regular high school. The only person who insisted I was weird was John Willoughby, who was a grade below me at school and never got over me beating him to black belt in tae kwon do even though I was a year older so that was perfectly legit.
"Brandon, dude," he'd jeered. "Are you gonna run for student cabinet as their diversity candidate? Just imagine what waves it'd make if you won, it'd be a record for neurodiversity in student government."
I ignored him of course; such ridiculous statements weren't worth fighting over. With my place at The P School secured, I wouldn't be there for senior year, so it was a moot point that I wouldn't be running for student cabinet. Besides, he'd been going around saying I had Asperger's for the longest time because I never let myself get sucked into fights with him, and he couldn't figure out any other reason why I didn't want to get fake ID and sneak alcohol at parties. And, naturally, because any high school kid who didn't mind being seen voluntarily opening a book and who thought cafeteria pranks were gross and stupid couldn't possibly be neurotypical, hah.
Next to the VIP orchid exhibit was Burkill Hall, a stately two-storey house with grand columns and a huge front terrace, not unlike an Asian version of Gone With The Wind. It proudly proclaimed it was the last surviving plantation-style house of its kind in Southeast Asia, built in 1868. We probably earned a ton of nerd points for choosing this moment to turn our phones on, carefully keeping them in airplane mode to avoid paying for roaming, to take our first selfies of this trip in front of that building. Just that one find was worth the fifteen Singapore dollars we'd paid apiece (about $11 in US dollars) to gain admission to this space.
Opposite Burkill Hall and the VIP Orchid Garden was the Vanda Miss Joaquim exhibit. This species of orchid was the national flower of Singapore, and like all the most intriguing things we'd seen so far, it was created by humans. Not men – I carefully avoided using the word "man-made", because it was bred by a woman, the "Miss Joaquim" who gave it its name.
"This flower deserves to be named after a woman," said Eliza. "It's one of the most feminine orchids in this garden."
I supposed, if you used your imagination, you could see how that might be true. The petals fluttered like the translucent fabric on the skirts of fancy ladies' dresses, and she kind of took the shape of an angel. Her multi tones of medium to light purple to white were a perfect match for the dress Eliza was wearing, and I wished I could buy her one to wear in her hair.
The rest of the orchid garden was, literally, a breeze. Two glass greenhouses stood at the far end of the garden, giving us a fleeting respite from the weather. These were where they showed the species that belonged at higher elevations, using a combination of air conditioning and mists to get the temperatures right.
"We're at between one thousand and two thousand metres," I said, doing the math in my head. "Reckon we could grow some of these in our back yards?"
"I dunno," said Eliza sceptically. "They look too fragile to survive the winter. Back home, they'd have to be hothouse flowers, I guess. Isn't that funny when down here, they're coolhouse flowers?"
I didn't think a coolhouse was a thing, but this house was literally named The Sembcorp Cool House, so it had to be. It kept us, fellow hothouse flowers from cooler climes (well, Eliza at least, I could hardly be called a flower) from wilting, too.
Slowly but surely, we made it to the other side of the Botanic Gardens after we reunited with Jerilyn and her photo crew. They'd bought us cold bottled coconut water to refresh ourselves, having made a jaunt back to the fusion food café near the entrance for Korean bingsu ice cream.
"We wanted to pack some for you, but it would melt, so cannot," said Jerilyn apologetically.
Behind the walls of a hidden garden, we could hear children laughing and squealing, practically beckoning us to join them.
"That is so Frances Hodgson Burnett," said Eliza. "Remember The Secret Garden? Maybe if we went in there, I'd get my miracle."
"Sorry, miss," said the man at the admissions desk, motioning for Eliza to keep her wallet. "It's free, but for children only. Adults can only go in if you're accompanying a child under fourteen."
How crazy could our world get? It seemed like society made its arbitrary rules on whether we were adults or not. On one end, we were told we couldn't do stuff because we were under eighteen, too young to drink, vote, book our own hotel rooms, or skydive. Then now, when we wanted to get into this miracle garden of youthful happiness, we were turned away because we weren't kids anymore. Would there ever be a place where we fit without feeling like impostors? Oh yes, of course there was, it was called high school, a.k.a. teen purgatory.
"Bummer," I said, kicking a pebble and scuffing the toe of one of my best leather dress shoes. Mom would throw a fit after I got home. The happy shouts of the kids reminded me of the first time our parents let Eliza and me play unsupervised at Memorial Park, after she'd been completely free from chemo for about a year. We were going into fourth grade, older than any of the other kids on the swings, but she still loved me to push her higher and higher, making up for lost time.
"Babies!" Johnny Willoughby had yelled, doing a wobbly ollie on his skateboard in front of us. He might've thought he was cool, but he looked a little ridiculous in his Spider-Man helmet, gloves, and knee pads. I did get the last laugh, though, by calling Dad and getting him to sign out a paddle board for us, so I could wave to Willoughby from the middle of Prospect Lake with Eliza sitting pretty in the front.
"It's June holidays now, so all the kids are going out," explained Jerilyn. "Normally, this place is not so noisy."
"They're really lucky," said Eliza, studying the sign which said, "Jacob Ballas Children's Garden". "Singapore really cares about its kids, to design such a huge garden specially for them."
"Singaporeans would say kids in the West are lucky," replied Jerilyn. "The education system here is very competitive. Kids in K1 already need to do spelling, and almost everybody has tuition. At twelve years old, they do PSLE which is a life-changing exam, because it determines which stream they go in secondary school. That's why some Singaporeans migrate to Australia, to give their kids a less stressful life."
"Ugh," said Eliza. "I thought doing the SAT was bad enough. And I don't know what to think of all those preschool kids in uniforms. It's stressful thinking about what to wear to school, but I don't know how I'd feel if that freedom was taken away from me from age two to eighteen."
There wasn't any point hanging around if we couldn't go into the Children's Garden, for I could tell that Eliza was flagging and she'd need to conserve her energy to get through the next few days. Back at the studio, after we'd changed back into our regular clothes, I popped over to 7-Eleven to pick up Slurpees for everybody to cool down with. Maybe it was cheating on our all-local resolution, but without fake ID, I couldn't avail myself of the Tiger Beer.
Jerilyn called us another taxi from the studio back to our hostel, where we took our showers, and I gave Eliza exactly one hour to nap before dinnertime. I was hoping to get to Clarke Quay before sunset, so we could see the riverside before it got dark. We got out the subway at the Clarke Quay Station, under Central Mall, where we could stroll along a walkway that stretched all the way up to the water, giving us a clear view of the other side, where little boats with tires hanging from their sides and backs were moored at the docks.
"Oh look, how cute," squealed Eliza, pointing at one of them sailing past us. "They painted eyes on it so it can see where it's going."
The bow of the boat did look a little like a bird, now that Eliza had drawn my attention to it, with a red patch like a beak at the tip of the bow, and green with zig-zag edges at the part where the bow started to taper in, over which they had painted round eyes that looked a little cartoonish, especially on an old-fashioned wooden boat.
A footbridge led us to the other side of the river, where Clarke Quay sat. It looked like a Disneyfied version of the shophouses that populated Tanjong Pagar and Chinatown, with all of them painted in bright pastel colours and joined by glass canopies between the buildings, a fountain in the courtyard at the middle of it all. To add to the touristy feel of the place, this seemed to be where all the white people in Singapore got together, with groups of them hanging out over drinks at the alfresco seating everywhere. Hooters was there, which would be great if I wanted bragging rights over Al, though not quite what I was aiming for with Eliza. A tall, grand, old-fashioned house with Oriental looking shutters on the windows and a roof that curved up at the sides stood out among all the other houses, fronted by an alfresco courtyard with a decorative stone fence in Oriental style too. The sign at the entrance said "Yin", and there were also plastic standing signs proclaiming the availability of Tiger Beer. No matter what kind of rich Chinese people this house might have played host to in the past, today it was clearly a place for white people with a wish for exoticism to party.
Everything at Clarke Quay was for people who drank, and it was all more than I wanted to spend, so we walked down to the main road and crossed the river again on a bigger bridge to get to Song Fa Bak Kut Teh, a local food outlet in a shophouse that had a Michelin Bib Gourmand award. I didn't know how to pronounce the name of the dish right, but I knew what we were here for, the special superpower of this place was the soup they cooked their pork ribs in. We had those, and the dough fritters were also supposed to go with them, with bowls of rice and a random green leafy vegetable I ordered by pointing on the laminated menu card. The broth was a clear broth, almost like French onion soup but a few shades lighter. It tasted a little like tea and some herbs I couldn't name, and the bite-size fritters were even more airy and crispy than a fried doughnut, except the dough was salted instead of sweet.
"This feels kind of rude," I said, glancing at everyone around us leaving their pork bones on the tables after they'd eaten the meat off them. There wasn't any other place we could put them, though, except back into our soup bowls. Our rice bowls weren't any better because they were so small, and the dough fritters were in their own basket served family style.
Eliza's hand was poised above the tabletop like mine, holding an empty bone with her chopsticks. One of the coffee shop attendants cleared a table that had recently been vacated, wiping it with a rag in a circular motion and skilfully sweeping away all the bones.
"Well, I guess, when in Rome…" she said, still a little hesitantly, then let the bone drop on the table. And I followed her lead, like I always did.
The next morning we slept in again, this time on purpose. We wouldn't need to go out early when the shops and museums wouldn't be open yet anyway, so we might as well free ourselves from alarms for once. It didn't stop us from being out the door and on the subway by mid-morning; a part of our subconscious must have known we were supposed to be on the adventure of a lifetime and wouldn't let us waste our time with sleeping.
This time, we took the Downtown Line to the Promenade station, then switched to the Circle Line to get to Esplanade where we got out. This landed us in a wide underground tunnel, air-conditioned and marble-floored, which had to be the width of at least one school classroom. There were shops and restaurants at the sides, and we found one that was open even at that early hour. Simply put, this had to be the poshest underground tunnel in existence.
Fun Toast was fancier than McDonald's but not quite assuming the pretensions of Starbucks. It offered coffee and toast set meals that sounded perfect for breakfast, but when I stood in line, I realized that Singaporeans even ordered coffee in a foreign language. There was no point trying to make sense of their lingo, so I simply repeated what the person in front of me had asked for.
"Two Kaya Butter Toast sets with Kopi C Siew Dai, please," I stammered, not quite hitting the sing-song tones but trying to enunciate every syllable to help them understand.
I brought back two plates with two toast sandwiches each (not surprising), teeny cups of milky hot coffee about half the size of a Starbucks Tall, and two dishes with two eggs in each of them. Hard-boiled, I presumed; well, this looked enough like a breakfast I could've had at home, even if I wished those coffee cups were a tad taller.
Except, of course, appearances were deceiving. Crustless slices of thick milky bread, more decadent than any of the whole-wheat peanut-butter-and-whatever sandwiches Mom had made us all our lives. A generous layer of butter, and something else that tasted sweet but with a slightly coconutty fragrance. Clearly, whoever invented a sandwich like this didn't have a care about processed carbs or fat content. I opened the sandwich to look at what they'd put in it, and saw a thick, gritty yellow paste with a greenish tinge. How gross – that tasted much better than it looked, so I hastily slapped the two slices of bread back together and continued munching on them.
Eliza turned the tiny plastic Chinese spoon from her coffee cup around in her hand with a puzzled expression, then tried tapping ineffectually at the shell of her egg with it. Those dinky spoons, I had to say, were kind of cute, and it seemed kind of random when we'd get those. For example, the Hainanese chicken rice yesterday had come with a normal metal fork and spoon.
I went back to the counter to fetch some small metal spoons, the kind we were familiar with for stirring coffee, and gave one of my eggs a hard whack. Wrong call again – what oozed out was a pile of goop, and I quickly picked up the other egg and wiped it off with a Kleenex to rescue it.
"Isn't that going to give us, like, salmonella?" said Eliza, eyeing it suspiciously. "Should we be sending it back?"
"Maybe the next one is cooked," I said, setting aside the little dish with the runny egg and cracking the second one against the side of the saucer. That was worse – with nothing to contain it, the goop ran out and dripped on the floor. Eliza hurriedly got out her pack of Kleenex from her purse and started mopping it up, a grim expression on her face.
"I think I should take it back," I suggested, bringing the offending dish and Eliza's two eggs to the counter.
"Excuse me?" I called, waving my hand in a bid to attract attention from the staff behind the counter. There were still some people in line, so I was ignored for quite a while.
After they'd cleared the line and were able to pause for a breather, one of the young men came over to me.
"What is it?" he asked. "Can I helped you?"
"I don't think my eggs were done," I said, gesturing to the goopy mess in the dish. "I thought it might only be that one, but my other one wasn't done either, so I'd like you to cook these two a little longer please, just in case."
"Orh, you don't know half boiled egg ah? It's like that one. You eat with soya sauce." He helpfully pointed to the sauce bottle at the spot where I'd helped myself to the metal spoons.
"OK, thanks," I said. Soya sauce was something I'd started to figure out, it sometimes came in thin coffee-brown guise, and other times as a thick black paste. The thicker, darker one had a little tinge of sweetness, and was what gave the black carrot cake its taste.
What they had in the bottle was the dark one, and I drizzled it around my egg in a spiral swirl, feeling like a pro. "Want me to do yours for you?" I offered Eliza.
"Sure," she said, "but there's no way I could eat two eggs all on my own. I'll take this one, and you can have both of mine."
Why did food writers always say American food was unhealthy? This breakfast looked deceptively small when it was arranged on the tray, but it felt more sinful than anything Mom had ever made. I didn't want to move after I was done, but I knew we'd probably be better off walking it off. We had a good amount of ground to cover.
"Wanna go?" I said, looking around for the station to bus our trays. There didn't seem to be any, everyone seemed to be leaving all their dirty plates on the table, at the mercy of the next server to come by and clear. Oh well.
We followed the U-shaped tunnel all the way to the other end, which led to the underground exit of the City Hall MRT entrance and a row of escalators up to the glass-lined atrium. A circular sign hanging from the ceiling like a chandelier, which read "Raffles City". There was a small glass door off to the side, which we pushed open and walked out into the sun.
Our first stop was the St. Andrew's Cathedral, just across the street. Most buildings in Singapore were cheek-by-jowl with the sidewalk and roads, but this snow-white building with Gothic spires and windows sat within a whole city block of lawn. I had learned up my facts when planning our itinerary, and while this church was nowhere near as old as the famous ones in Europe, it was still probably one of the oldest buildings in Singapore, at over 160 years old.
"This could've come out of Jane Eyre," said Eliza approvingly. "Or Harry Potter."
"Nah, it isn't quite dark enough," I said. "It's too clean. Think of all the work it took to keep those white walls from getting dirty."
Neither of us had been to Europe before, nor were we likely to have the chance to do so; therefore, this was probably the best chance we had to appreciate the architecture of a historical church up close. The inside of it was bright and clean, not deep, dark, and spookily suggestive like, say, Westminster Abbey or something. Just like the spanking newness of the airport, Clarke Quay, and Raffles City, it was eager to show us the immaculate perfection of modern Singapore. With only one difference – this, an Anglican cathedral, was surely part of the mark that the British had left behind. I could not pretend to know how the locals might feel about their former colonial masters, but if they treasured this landmark instead of torching it, those sentiments were probably not entirely unfriendly.
Opposite the St. Andrew's Cathedral was a huge open lawn stretching for two large city blocks. This was what they called the Padang, another incongruity in this densely built-up space. If I hadn't done my research, I would not have known what this empty field was used for, as there was nobody on it and it didn't seem to be doing anything in particular; it wasn't a soccer field, or a baseball diamond, not to mention there were no bleachers for watching any games people might want to play on it. But that belied all the things that had happened there in nearly two hundred years of its history – transfers of power from the British to the Japanese and back, and then to Malaysia before, finally, independence. All that seemed to read like a storybook now, tales of times so long buried they felt unreal amidst the humdrum everyday rhythm that seemed as if things had been that way forever.
Beside the cathedral, alongside the Padang, was what they now called the National Gallery, consisting of what used to be the City Hall and Supreme Court buildings. City Hall was a wide grey four-storey stone building with Roman columns and majestic stone steps leading up to the grand entrance and terrace on the second floor.
Once upon a time, I'd promised Eliza that I'd take her to the Louvre. We'd spend an entire summer in Europe, I'd said, indulging in all our history-nerd fantasies from Stonehenge to the Coliseum to the Berlin Wall. And a visit to Auschwitz, if we made our own rules for no touristy behaviour and no selfies, might be a good way to stay woke. That trip was supposed to happen the summer after we turned eighteen and graduated high school, and I'd saved my birthday and Christmas money assiduously ever since we started hatching that plan.
Well, this would have to be our Louvre, because even if by a miracle, Eliza could travel to Europe next summer, I would be signing over my next five summers to military and leadership training, should all go well with my plans. If it was any consolation at all, to our fresh eyes, the National Gallery proved to be every bit as interesting as the Louvre. I did not expect that sombre grey building, which looked like a workaholic Parthenon on the outside, to have gleaming checkerboard marble floors and warm wooden accents on the inside, with carved wooden patterns on the ceiling. I had not thought that Asian people would take European styles of art and use them to depict their own world. I couldn't have guessed that anyone would dare to cut holes in the sides of two well-respected historical buildings to join them together. For that was what they did, building bridges beneath a golden screen, a flash of Asia and modernity between the two grey columned structures, which had been built in colonial times and stood, not tall but certainly wide and imposing, and more immaculately preserved than any we might have seen in Europe.
We must have spent at least two hours roaming the various exhibits, before emerging from the glass door in between the buildings. A short walk brought us to the riverfront, some distance downstream from where we'd explored at Clarke Quay the evening before. We'd come not just to see more colonial buildings and the skyline of the financial district, with hundred-storey skyscrapers towering behind shophouses, but also to come face-to-face with the statue of Sir Stamford Raffles, the guy who'd been given the credit for starting it all.
"The first nabob," said Eliza, folding her arms in a mirror image of Sir Stamford's posture and staring him in the eye. "If you were here today, you wouldn't have called these the East Indies."
"How so?" I asked, amused. "Because they beat colonialism, or because they're maybe even more modern than Britain and America?"
"All that," replied Eliza, "and because there's so many Chinese, and all kinds of other cultures, it'd be reductionist to call everybody Indians. But, I guess, that's what we did to the Native Americans," she added, shrinking away contritely.
Having paid our (dis)respect to Raffles, we crossed the river on an old suspension footbridge, to pass the Fullerton Hotel (too rich for us) and see the statue of the Merlion, spitting water out into the bay. Across the water, a giant Ferris wheel stood out against more skyscrapers, and the three towers of Marina Bay Sands, with a building like an upturned palm with too many (cut-off) fingers at the end of the podium, stood at the other side. This was the man-made part of Singapore, born to give tourists like us something more to see. But we'd seen a lot of crazy amazing things already in just thirty-six hours, and I doubted that even in thirty-six more, we could possibly ever run out of new sights and experiences.
By walking far enough down the waterfront, until we stopped seeing tourists taking pictures and the locals in smart business wear took their place, we found more affordable places for lunch. This time, we'd do something slightly fancier than yesterday, and try out the Foodfare food court across the road at Clifford Centre.
It was lunchtime for all the working people, with long lines everywhere, but we got lucky with two empty seats, a small packet of Kleenex sitting neatly on the table in front of each one. If that was what they gave you when you went the next rung up from food centres to food courts, that was pretty posh by street food standards.
"Oi, that seat chope already," said the guy sitting on the opposite side of the table, shooting us a dirty look.
"What do you mean?" I asked, picking up the Kleenex packet. "Didn't the food court give us these?"
"Tissue packets are for choping seats," that guy explained. Seeing my blank look, he added, "Chope means reserve already, so you cannot sit."
"Oh." I dropped the tissue packet, relieved that I hadn't helped myself to one of them yet. "I guess that means there's no seats, then."
"Well, we could still get takeout and go eat by the Merlion," suggested Eliza. And it was probably not a bad time for me to start testing out my new vocabulary from two nights ago.
"Da bao," I said after ordering two bowls of dumpling noodles from a stall, the first thing I saw that didn't look as if it was drowning in chili. And when I got a plastic bag with the two containers, I knew I'd at least said it well enough to be understood.
After lunch, we took the MRT from Raffles Place to Marina Bay, then switched trains to Bayfront to get to the Gardens by the Bay with as little walking as possible. There was a tram we could ride into the park, which dropped us off by the two big glass domes fronting the water. At twenty-eight Singapore dollars apiece, this was one of the pricier attractions we'd visited so far, but when it promised to bring us up the top of a mountain rainforest and to see flowers from all the different parts of the world, that didn't sound so terribly spendy. It'd have to be our Europe, all over again.
In the taller of the two domes, an elevator took us up six levels, with one more flight of stairs taking us to the winding spiral ramp encircling a mini mountain covered with plants, which would bring us all the way from ten thousand feet to sea level. A waterfall came down from this mound covered with all kinds of ferns, and a mist sprayed through the air, leaving it cool and dewy. None of these plants were meant for this island, which was why they had to put them in a greenhouse and make fake fog, creating a subtropical climate that gave us a soothing respite from the muggy heat outside. Back home, I never had to think about how trees happened, though somebody must have planted them to line the sidewalks and frame the entrance to our school building. But wherever they were, they still felt logical, not like the way people put plants in all the craziest indoor spaces here. It seemed as if they were thinking, if they didn't put a tree in every conceivable place, they'd end up with a concrete wasteland where they'd forget that trees ever existed. Which, honestly, in a place as busily urban as this, might very well be possible.
At the very bottom of the dome, the waterfall spewed wet spray; you could see on the floor the area where you wouldn't want to be if you wished to have a hope of staying dry. We backed up to the railing, as close to the waterfall as we could get, to take a wefie; they wouldn't let us get under it, anyway, so we wouldn't be drenched, and we made sure we went right outside after so we'd dry off in no time.
The other dome, the Flower Dome, was the one that excited all of Eliza's senses of twee. That was the one which had all the colourful European flowers, with cute little themed figurines in their midst, and all the Mediterranean cacti as well.
"You'd never get this much colour in real life," she observed, while directing exactly what she wanted in the background as I took a picture of her.
If there was anything that could be said about those domes, this was a crazy rich country. Those trees in the baggage carousel were just the tip of the iceberg, a teeny hint of how green could be man-made in dizzying proportions. Gold mohrs were old coins in India, I wouldn't be able to get hold of them, but I could bring Eliza to see all these places, where money had been no object in pursuit of the extraordinary.
But that wasn't the end of my surprise for the day. The British and the Dutch had mined Southeast Asia for gold in the colonial days, and gold was what I planned to give her. With a special, unforgettable touch that could only be found here, naturally.
"Here's the second item on your wish list," I said, fastening the chain at the back of her neck and letting her admire the orchid pendant in the mirror. "Gold mohrs, Singapore style, a real orchid plated in gold."
That orchid, of course, was the Vanda Miss Joaquim.