Gardens by the Bay, Singapore
Singapore, the garden city. In some ways the Gardens by the Bay is quite representative, it’s completely manufactured, artificially cooled, carefully zoned, oddly homogenous, and you know, still, in its own way, absolutely beautiful.
There is an odd tension within me. I love the outdoors, I love mountains and lakes and woods and crisp air and still nights, and yet that bit of me, that Singaporean, practical, trained, mathematical, is a personality drawn to the beauty in disorder within order. I can understand why the Gardens would be derided for all those reasons I’ve provided above, yet I unequivocally love it. I love running to the Bay just so I can duck under the helix bridge and head for the gardens, and the paths and the artificial lake, and the wooden swings at the far end which are sometimes taken up by Bangladeshi workers. I love rising up from the underpass at the MRT, up those laborious flights of stairs, into the expanse of green and people. I love strolling across the bridge, first at the hotel, then the dragonfly bridge, running into multiple tourists with their cameras, all trying to capture some pathetic memory of a garden by an expressway, but all I want is the solitude and aloneness in the park, a space in the big city.
Tulipmania runs now till 20th May at the Gardens by the Bay. Entrance is S$10 (USD$8).
Big, Big World 