Orchard and the crowd - I felt like a tourist though.

I woke up on a Saturday late in the morning as it was 9:30 AM. This past few days, I would normally get up from bed at 6AM. My Indonesian mate and I just went to the hotel cafe to again savor the free breakfast. After breakfast we went up to our room at the 5th floor. I did my own personal time by browsing the web, checking my gmail and yahoomail, while I listen to music along with it.

At around 1PM the free internet connection that we have in the hotel got disconnected. We just prepared and decided to go to POSB. There's a branch at Ngee Ann City, so we went there and found the bank at the 4th floor of the building. We need to open a bank account for our salary. Here in Singapore, you can use any bank of your choice for your payroll. I was amazed at how fast things were processed. It took me 20 minutes to open the savings account with passbook and ATM card readily available. Well the bad thing is they require 500 SG dollars for the initial deposit amount which was quite a sum.

Olga sent an MMS to me saying that she's coming to Orchard to have our keys duplicated. So we decided to meet her at Lucky Plaza as that's the only place where we can have our keys done. When Olga arrived, she had to call and text me at the same time and I did the same because Orchard was filled with lots of people doing shopping and excursions. I found Olga at the engorge of the building and so we just got inside and looked for the building directory. We couldn't find one so we went to customer service. The staff guy who looked diligently answered our queries. He even pointed out what unit in what floor and which way of the building. He seemed to have memorized the building's blue print.

We arrived at the stall of the key maker and Olga did her transactions. The key for the main door was not duplicated because the key maker did not have that type of key, but the side door's key were good to go. I paid Olga 2.80 SG$ for the key. We felt a little hungry because obviously I did not have my lunch. We went to the building's food court and took our picks for lunch.

After lunch we decided to do window shopping. We walked and walked around Orchard which sent my feet in pain and so we stopped by at Singapore Tourist's Center and had an electronic foot massage. It was soothing. We then decided to just walk around. The three of us bought ice cream bars. There just huge crowd and so we decided to just go window shopping. When Orchard got dark, we thought of stopping by at the street shows. We first stopped at the contortionists show. There were two girls there bending and showing their flexible bodies in dark leotard suits. After that we passed by at a children's choir, then at the Korean community doing some of their cultural show. There was an Indonesian community as well. We also passed by at the pantomime area where the crowd was endless at taking pictures with the animate character. We then stopped at the Filipino community. We spent a total of 3o minutes their watching them sing native songs and some dance performance. The crowd were a mix but you can see that there were other Filipinos aside from us. You would also notice them visibly because after the performance they would clap their hands terribly and scream (is it a sign of narcissism or just pure or total admiration of the performance). For me it was just an ordinary performance. I enjoyed it and also cheered through clapping but not scream. I even asked my self in English candidly and the guy beside me must have overheard and replied that it was just an extreme appreciation of the performance. I just shut myself up and enjoy the performance while laughing at the back of my mind. Another thing caught my attention was when I looked behind me, I saw some member of the Korean Community watching the show which was a little funny for me. I told Olga and we were just slightly laughing. I mean why would they be there instead of attending their own show? Or maybe their show or performances was finished....

After watching three performances, we accompanied Olga to the bus stop bound for Ghim Moh, where my future address be.