A walk in the park

Yesterday we were suddenly child-less. OK, not quite...

The four older kids went over to their cousins' house for the evening to play. Their aunt and cousins came over to pick them up. As the excited group left the house, you can hear the chatter and laughter leaving the house with them, growing fainter and fainter and then suddenly, all was silent. Wah... we had a few hours of noise-less bliss!

So KH and I decided to head for Botanic Gardens for an evening walk with Trin in the stroller. The park was lovely. Filled with couples and families, dogs, children, tourists. As usual, it always feels a bit strange going out with just one kid instead of the usual noisy brood. Took a while to get used to.

Watching the people and walking among them, it struck me that Singapore had become so international. And the Botanic Gardens is one place where everyone could find their space, and still feel as if they belonged to a community. Somehow, despite all the talk in the papers and the ST poll about foreigners and the "us versus them" mentality, this is one place where I think the differences, if any, are neutralised.

I picked up snatches of conversations in French (a family with a baby having a picnic on the lawn in Palm Valley), Japanese (another family observing the carps in the pond), Beijing-accented Mandarin (a couple taking a picture in front of a waterfall) and of course, the ubiquitous Singlish! We saw Malay women in their tudungs, ang-moh families with picnic baskets on the lawn, Indian nuclear families with babies in strollers. And the dogs - all breeds and sizes and colours!

Sitting down to nurse Trin on a bench above Palm Valley, we saw an eagle soaring high above the treetops, swooping and circling before coming to rest on a branch far away. Imagine - we have these huge birds (and it was huge - the wingspan must have been more than a metre judging from the size and the distance where we saw it) in the heart of the city. It was such a beautiful sight.

Singapore is changing so much. According to the press, we are now one of the best places to party. The numbers of foreigners picking Singapore to live and work in are growing and this came home to me last evening in the park.

The park itself has grown and changed. I'm glad the old lake with the island is still there, but sad that the iron-wrought gates that guarded the Holland Road entrance has gone. There are new vistas - a bold sweeping lawn from up the hill down to the old lake, dotted with big old trees, and old ones - taking a narrow lane bordered by tall hedges, we came out into the old rose garden. The centrepiece sundial was still there. As were the old, uneven brick pavements and steps.

Pausing to look uphill towards the old 1930s bandstand, the raintrees were gleaming yellow against the blue evening sky. Which led me to comment to KH: eh, no need to go to Japan to see autumn. We have it right here! If I took a photograph of this scene, with a bit of the modern glass roof (of the bonsai exhibits) in the scene, it would not look out of place in a Japanese park!

Walking through made me promise myself that I would one day come back, sans children, when they have grown up, with a good book and find a quiet corner in the park for some solitude. How nice it would be to curl up with a book on a bench in a leafy spot (ok, armed with mosquito repellent!). But almost immediately, the next thought that crossed my mind was: how lonely I will be then!! Especially when we saw so many families with little children playing, running, cycling...

After the park, we had dinner, went to NTUC for some very prosaic grocery shopping, then back home to a houseful of noisy kids. Gillian cheerfully telling me about her period - again! Isaac rolling his eyes and telling me that Cait was being a cry-baby and didn't want to bathe. Owain clamouring for - what else - nen-nen! Cait hugging my arm and saying that gor-gor and che-che were very rude to her... Yes, they were back! And with them, the noise too. But I was never more glad for the din...