I like Singapore. Really like Singapore. Three days wasn’t really enough, but we managed to pack a fair amount in. While Singapore is famous for it’s waterfront and different ‘ethnic’ areas, a great start to exploring this city state is it’s museums and galleries. Below are details on two of them.
A great place to start a visit to Singapore is the National Museum of Singapore. Like much of Singapore, the great impression starts with the architecture – here it is both an old colonial building with a new extension. The impressive displays include a thorough History of Singapore gallery which gives a very thorough run down of the history of the Island state. A word of warning – take the free audio guide as there are very few captions to explain what you are looking at. Other permanent galleries include four ‘Singapore Living Galleries’ which cover fashion, food (sure to be a favourite with kids: you can touch and smell stuff), photography and film & wayang (a form of traditional chinese opera). There are also many temporary exhibitions. The gift shop is small but full of very funky and quirky Singapore ‘things’. The admission ticket (kids six and under are free) will also give you admission to the nearby Singapore Art Museum, which has a mix of modern and older South East Asian art, and is again in an interesting building, a former mission school.
Willem enjoys seeing himself at the National Museum of Singapore
A nice way to get to the National Museum, or somewhere to go afterwards, is Fort Canning Park. Believed to be the home of royalty when Singapore was the Malay kingdom of Temasek, Fort Canning was later the home of colonial ‘royalty’, and then later a military base in World War II. All this history and more is featured in the park, along with beautiful tropical gardens. Highlights include a wall of carvings that are a modern take on traditional Malay wall carvings which tell the history of the area, various walking trails you can download from the Singapore National Parks website, and just sitting around soaking in the tropical smells, luscious green and slight reduction in temperature compared to down on the street. The park can be very busy early in the morning with stollers and runners, but is probably coolest then. While I didn’t have a huge problem with the humidity in Singapore, try and organise your day around being inside during daylight hours if humidity knocks you about. Hey, I have an idea – what about the National Museum? 
Taking in the greenery, Fort Canning Park
