Haw Par Villa... Was Pretty Small

Ah.

I went on leave yesterday to account for the fact that there isn't any public holiday for March.

I spent much of the morning walking about the southwest side of SIN city, starting with Haw Par Villa. It had been about 20+ years since the last time that I was there, and the last time that it had come into my consciousness was a year and change ago. However, I couldn't satisfy want to visit then due to the closure and restoration. The eventual re-opening was without fanfare, and after a few months, I finally had the opportunity to go visit.

Frankly, it was underwhelming.

I remembered Haw Par Villa as being pretty large, and with many exhibits; lots of things to see and do, colourful to a fault.

What I ended up seeing (together with Harish) was a kitschy three-quarter scale diorama of models of fading paint jobs, with semi-logical arrangement, and an entire walk space that was completed in less than two hours, even with us being fairly casual and actively doing a multi-cache attempt. It was way smaller than I had remembered, and it felt like a big... disappointment.

The Hell's Museum was the revamped version of the infamous ``18-levels of hell'' diorama exhibit that was converted into a water ride through a dragon during the ``Haw Par Villa Dragon World'' era, before being re-converted back to a walking exhibit after that. It required an admission fee which on its own was not a big deal, but they had required a priori online booking of the admission ticket, with no way of buying them ``on the spot''. That was either a misunderstanding of what I heard from an officious attendant, or was actually the case. Harish and I didn't know about that, and didn't go in.

We went off to West Coast Park later on to find a couple more geocaches, my first finds in a few years. They were simple traditional finds, and were nice. The walk was invigorating, and lots of nice conversations were had with Harish too.

We eventually made our way to VivoCity for lunch, where we used up the complimentary voucher that I had for tcc. I managed to run my quarterly medicine run after that as well, and ran into the weird situation where the Visa Paywave system was rejecting my card, and also Harish's when I asked him for help. It was eventually resolved through a hard reset of the device... through the advice of the customer that came after me while I was standing ``guard'' to look out for my meds while Harish went to grab some cash from the ATM. Though resolved, I just paid it off in cash---didn't want to waste more time while waiting for them to sort out their internal database contents.

And that was that. Not much else to report. Just felt like writing something down about the little break. I need to figure out how to get me a pie to celebrate π-day on Monday---it's probably going to be a solo thing, I suppose.

Till the next update.