Let’s be impractical

Posted by captaincream under Blogging, Museums/Heritage Galleries
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Singapore is a pragmatic nation. Wear a jacket out to lunch and you’re asked by many a well-meaning one-layerer, “Not hot meh?”. This is a nation that goes for breakfast in the clothese he/she woke up in, speaks in a combination of languages to converse in (with as few words as possible), grudgingly inches out of your path when you try to get out of the MRT door, and garnishes every condominium ad with the promise that all you need is “at your doorstep.”

Yet there comes about the rare occasion when Singaporeans will do the impractical, the height of which is braving the weather (gasp!) for hours. The reward for being impractical has to be big enough a draw, like free tickets to the NDP, a chance to be the next Singapore Idol, or the new iPhone. Last weekend, the big draw was a museum.

On Saturday (11 July), the rain came upon the Night Festival with thunder, and at 9 pm I thought surely everyone would go home. But when the weather trickled off to a drizzle after 10 pm, I found hundreds of people back outside the museum, determined that Pan.Optikum would carry on. Many swarmed into the National Museum and enthusiastically snapped photos of everything they saw. My friend, K, shook his head at them, being the seasoned museum visitor he is (two museum trips in two weekends, not bad at all). We waited till 10:30, then patiently till 11. So did families with young children too, fanning themselves with program booklets.

Not that the entire show was even visible to majority of the audience. Because of the disadvantageous slope of the SMU green, the first act was a solely audio experience to 3/4 of the crowd. Still we waited noiselessly, without umbrellas so as not to obscure anybody’s view, because everybody wanted to see fireworks. The singing acrobat fell off her platform and an emergency doctor was called, but if not for the announcement we wouldn’t even have known that anybody had fallen.

And then the fireworks came, and the crowd was happy enough to have waited in the rain. From the post-show bustle around me, I figured that half of these people had watched the previous night’s show too, and that the fireworks had been better. Still there was a calm smile that descended upon everyone as they shuffled off in shallow puddles and took the plastic wraps off their children’s heads.

I like us when we are impractical.

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