Thursday we decided to visit the Singapore National museum. This sounds relatively easy but first of all we made it complicated by deciding to walk there crossing Canning fort to do so. We found the way relatively easily but then lost each other at a loo stop. The tour director was not amused by the fact that I had wandered off looking for her, but at the time I had no idea where exactly she was.
Once we were reunited and she had calmed down a little we found our way to the museum, which is a truly astounding building. Some of the museum is in an old nineteenth century building but over that the museum has built a new twenty first century shell.
We entered from the park into the second floor and wandered around unchallenged trying to discover where we could purchase a ticket. This was eventually resolved and we thoroughly enjoyed a guest exhibition from the British museum, entitled Treasures of the World. We also enjoyed the History of Singapore Hall. We had lunch in the museum restaurant and then after looking at a couple of other things we decided to walk home stopping off at the supermarket to buy a few essentials which we appeared to have forgotten in our earlier forays.
Our general impression is that the Singapore national museum is well worth visiting and we would recommend it to everybody who visits the city. Canning fort is also well worth a visit as around the hill it is built in are a number of placards detailing the the history of Singapore and the part this hill had played in it. This went back to the thirteenth century and continued onto the Second World War when the hill was the command centre for the British and Australian forces defending Singapore against the Japanese. The hill is steep and is quite a walk in the heat of the Singapore day but it was well worth the effort.