I got to go on an individual exploration of MUSEUMS last Thursday. It was a blazing hot day and I slathered on sunscreen and got the 191 to buona vista and the train to city hall to find the peranakan museum.
I walked around a little and directed a lost tourist to the mrt station, and felt a little like a lost tourist myself. I didn't see nay sign of the peranakan museum, and so I decided to go to the philatelic museum although I am not awfully interested in stamps in themselves - the pictures on them and the letters they hold yes but not the object itself.
God must have been guiding my feet (and the urban planning of the government), because as I walked past the philatelic museum I saw a sign pointing me toward the peranakan museum!
So I got there, showed the man at the counter my IC to get a free pass for a guided tour, and joined a pair of old ladies and our tour guide Janis Woon. Janis asked why I decided to come, and I told her about how SC was a peranakan school, and that I wanted to find out more about the culture I had been partially exposed to. I remember Alisha Makwana being peranakan, and going for a trip to Malacca in Sec 1 where they showed us an old peranakan house that had a hole in the second floor for spying on people on the first floor, and cooking peranakan dishes (that were too spicy for me to eat) in home economics lessons, and wearing the iconic sarong kebaya for choir performances, but that's about my knowledge about the culture of the peranakan.
So Janis brought us through the origins of the Peranakan (they are a cultural rather than racial entity! Pretty cool) and their wedding and language and costume and religion and kitchen and nyonya-ware. It sounds rather dull but honestly, it was one of the best museum tours I've been on. Janis kept it interesting by asking questions and telling us stories from her own peranakan heritage, such as how her grandmother would get whacked on the head by her own mother because she didn't follow her mother's peranakan recipes to the letter.
These funny walls were right next to the Peranakan Museum.
I had a solitary lunch at SMU, which I would have been terrified of last time - eating alone in a public place used to be so difficult and embarrassing, until I realised that no one was watching me eat and also that honestly I needed to be less self conscious.
The national museum was rather underwhelming. The Singapore History Gallery was closed for renovation, and it's poor replacement is the 'Singapura 700 years' exhibition which, while educating people about the nature of archaeology, doesn't tell much about any of the 700 years of Singaporean history I was expecting it to. I think it's a good way of showing people that all these excavations are not futile, but rather premature since no comprehensive hisotrical narrative can yet be spun from these artefacts. Still, I'm quite excited for the time when they will know how Singaporeans lived, and the mental picture in my head of a sea side village of rickety bamboo and rattan huts with loin-cloth clad brown skinned children running around catching fish and crabs will be replaced by a more historically accurate picture.
My mum says these statues have been here since she arrived in Singapore, but they could pass as modern art in my opinion. They remind me of the ring of sculpted children round the pond in Macpherson Primary where we used to park to go to church.
I returned home quite happy and tired.
More of these solitary adventures to come - next stop: the Sun Yat Sen Museum!
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