On Explore Singapore! so far: The somewhat disoriented fresh-off-the-boat-from-England Sarah (played by Elizabeth Tan) is looking for her long-lost mother, with the assistance of former museum curator Mr Heng (played by Moses Lim). We don’t know much about Sarah’s parents, but we know that they romanced among Singapore’s wartime sites. Oh, and Sarah and Mr Heng take a lot of tea breaks at our local museums.
So where to next?
Well, you could call this the “Explore (Essential Services of) Singapore” episode, but that wouldn’t necessarily do justice to the range of stories told at the museums featured in this week’s episode. There’s more to the Civil Defence Heritage Gallery than tales of firemen sliding down ladders (though there’s some priceless footage of that). And there’s more to hospital museums — specifically, the ones at the Singapore General Hospital and Tan Tock Seng Hospital — than stethoscopes and narrow old patient beds (though there’s one with an interestingly placed, um, hole).
Or you could call this the “Museums in places you didn’t expect” episode, because I certainly didn’t know that the two hospitals and NEWater treatment plant had their own museum spaces. And if I hadn’t spent so much time in the Hill Street area recently, I wouldn’t have known that the classic old brick fire station is home to a heritage gallery either. It’s stunning to think that the fire station was once the tallest building in the town of Singapore, dwarfed as it is now by Funan Centre and the Hotel Excelsior across the road.
With fire(men), water (treatment) and medicine at the heart of this episode, there’s more than the fair share of “nation-building” stories. But ultimately it’s the human interest stories that prove more interesting, whether about a certain canteen at the old medical school at SGH where mee soup was apparently the order of the day, or about the number of English “imports” that still can be found in the old fire station. And look out for former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s cameo, about as unlikely a topic as you’d ever imagine hearing him speak about.
Watch this next episode of Explore Singapore! on Thursday, 28 December at 7:30 pm on Channel 5.
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