Singapore’s Little India

Chinatown has been covered, the CBD is crossed off my list, and I’ve already experienced a weekend of Singaporean nightlife.

Next up: Little India!

Although every guesthouse I stayed at in Malaysia had been located in Chinatown, Singapore’s budget backpacker cluster focuses almost entirely in Little India. Thus even though I’d yet to do any deliberate tourism in the area, what I learned upon making my way through the walking tour is that, over the course of the past few days, I’ve inadvertently seen nearly everything of note.

Abdul Gaffoor Mosque is literally right next door to my hostel so I’ve walked by it dozens of times;

The Tekka Centre, located at the nearest MRT station, has provided the better part of my meals.

The Mustafa Center, one of the best-deal shopping centers in the area, is where I’d been looking for new flipflops just a couple days earlier,

And of course there’s the beautiful Sri Srinivasa Perumal Temple which I happened past on the way there.

Even the smaller sidestreets included in the route were familiar from my very first day of searching for a better hostel. So while it was a beautiful day and very pleasant walk, I can’t really say any of it was all that groundbreaking…

…Except perhaps for the Sungei Rd Thieves Market. A “jumble of wares sold by anybody from fashionable students, gnarled old Hokkien ‘uncles’ and some of Singapore’s homeless,” the Thieves Market is a real oddity among the spotless order of Singapore. It was perhaps the first thing I’ve seen in days that actually made me feel like I’m still in SouthEast Asia 😉

Then, because the walk concluded right at Sim Lim Square, I figured I’d take the opportunity to wrap up my only bit of shopping for the trip.

Sim Lim Square is the biggest electronics mall in the country, and because Singapore is one of the best places in the world for cheap brand-name electronics (second only to Hong Kong), I’ve been slowly building a list of items to pick up while here: an SD reader for my iPhone, a backup charger, a travel repeater, and so forth. I stopped in a few times already to jot down model numbers and prices, and now that I’d done my homework it was time to pull the trigger.

Yay – I love shopping for toys. And it’s even more amusing when they take me for a fool and try to convince me that a part is capable of doing something I know it isn’t. They always feel pretty foolish when I explain to them why what they’re trying to sell me is technologically impossible 😆

Note: These posts are behind realtime; the above took place on Tuesday, February 22nd.