Thursday morning was quiet as we seemed to have been rushing around quite a lot. Sometimes when you are travelling like this it is both a good and necessary thing to relax for a couple of hours. So Rosemarie went for a swim and I did some reading before preparing an early lunch.
After lunch, in the way of mad dogs we set off in the midday heat to walk to the Singapore Art Gallery. It really is no more than a mile form David's flat but in the heat that mile is probably the equivalent of two in England.
The Singapore National Art Gallery has the finest collection of South East Asian Art or so it says. We arrived and were directed to the ticket office in what turned out to be the most architecturally astounding building. The old City Hall and th Supreme Court have been turned into one block by adding a twenty first century atrium and several footbridges at different levels. The roof has been completely modernised and turned into a garden with a restaurant, bar and a pool. The pool is made of glass so that when you are in the building you can look up through it and when you are on the roof obviously you may look into the building. The tour director was a bit miffed as I had promised her a drink in the bar, but when we got to the roof it started to pour with rain, and the staff were covering tables and chairs.
The art was interesting and covered almost all of Asia we particularly liked the Chinese inspired art but we both struggle with modern abstractionism. We spent the whole afternoon wandering around the buildings, the Supreme Court section has the most wonderful rotunda which is now under a new roof, so rather like the National Museum they have enclosed an old building within a new one. This doesn't sound like much until you go to floor five where you can now walk around the top of the old building and look through the windows downwards.
After the gallery we made our way home via Raffles City Mall, which gave the tour director a chance to look at a few works of art that are called shoes.
In the evening we went to a road in Singapore which is closed every night to allow hawkers to sell Satay, skewered of meat or prawns cooked over charcoal barbecues. There was something magical about eating out in the open surrounded by the high rises of the Central Business District with their lights on.
Daivid then took us to a high level bar in a sky scraper where you could enjoy a drink outside marvelling at the views, there was a pleasant breeze and the lights twinkled. We watched the nightly light show from Marina Bay Sands and met some other ex pats, one from Germany and one from Norway. Soon one drink had turned into four and before we knew it it was one' o'clock in the morning.