Wind In My Head: Heart and Soul
Wind In My Head
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Heart and Soul
It's been quiet on this blog. There is a reason. It's not a new one, it's one rehashed every couple of weeks, except that this time round it's been more intense. 4 am mornings do not do good things for a blogging drive. It kills it extremely quickly. Excuses are aplenty. "Not tonight honey, I have a headache", "I have an early/long day tomorrow", "we'll see if we can squeeze in time for a quicky, mid morning" (that almost never happens), "let me get all this work out of the way first" (even less likely to happen than the previous one). So, there's been a drought.Let's see, I wanted to blog about the muffin I went all out to find and eat (cranberry muffin chock full of cranberries washed down with peppermint tea- divine!), the muffins that I did eventually bake, the unusual trips Packrat and I made to video stores to get educated on and subsequently buy Korean dramas, taking time out of my hamster-running on a wheel- days to sit down and actually pen a letter to a dear friend, only to get mercilessly mocked about having used a pink pen and therefore causing the words to swim before her very eyes, booking and informing my silly puppies about an upcoming high tea where I was bombarded with questions like "what shall we wear? Can we wear a tuxedo?" , being an aunt again to the best friend's baby, photos to come later, hopefully and being extremely, inimitably, immeasurably exhausted.
But since I do have to get back to my work in the next twenty minutes or else I'm going to throw in the towel for the day, I shall blog about going to the newest, most giantess, mall that has opened in Singapore. We went, because we needed a new water filter and Packrat decided that we should go there and try and get one. The proverbial killing two birds with one stone. Another bird was added in yesterday afternoon when I got an email from FJ Benjamin (not the guy himself, though) that Gap Singapore was opening there, yesterday. Yes! No more online shopping. Upon receiving my message where my excited jumping jelly bean state could be felt through the whatever waves SMS uses to send messages, Packrat must have wondered what in the world he had got himself into.
Anyway, we make our way there after dinner. And I must say, it is a rather cavernous mall. It doesn't really feel as if you were in Singapore. This felt like a huge American mall with all the space. Unfortunately, it was teeming with people. Not as bad as it could be since the walkways were huge. We didn't say very much while we were there because it was quite difficult to talk over the din. Also recall the great exhaustion that reared its ugly head once I realised it was more fun to shop at Gap in the US or online. But we did come to this conclusion, it was a shopping mall without a soul. Possibly because it was new, but possibly because it was trying to be everything. There were upmarket chi-chi stores along one walkway, make a wrong turn and you're in the seedier, darker poorer side of the mall where the service staff all welcome you with the prosaic, Singaporean "Can I helpch chew?". In and out, you weave through high fashion, plebian fashion, street fashion and bad fashion. You see upmarket restaurants with fancy names and long queues but beside it, people sitting on the kindly provided seats for boyfriends and husbands to endure their long weekend waits, eating out of plastic takeaway boxes. In our local Straits dialect, there is a word for this. Chapalang- loosely translated into, 'everything also got'.
Hence the conclusion of no soul. That did launch us into a discussion of which malls had soul and which malls had personality and which malls had nothing but cold hard marble floor and things to be sold. It's made for an interesting discussion because it's not something we can quantify, soul. But it's something we feel, and every shopping mall has a different feel to it. Our unanimous conclusion was that the real Tangs (just take a look at the link and you'll get what I mean) not the one at Vivocity had the most soul. It's a pity that even Tangs had to sell its soul.
Technorati Tags: Singapore, blogging, Vivocity,shopping malls
Ondine tossed this thought in at 09:06
1 thoughts...
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At 9:15 pm
seriously! said... Your dear friend must be feeling very sorry right now. Surely she wasn't trying to mock you! (How dare she!) In fact, she is stocking up on all pens pink, just for you. : )