Alright! Before the end of Ramadhan we headed to the Malay Heritage Centre! This was the morning before I headed to the bazaar in the evening.
And so we headed to the compound of the old Kampung Gelam’s Istana (palace). It’s actually pretty big with various carriages, ships and stuff on the lawn. There’s also a fountain in the front of the main building and huts where you can sit and talk with your friends at. Entrance fees were $4 for adults, $3 for senior citizens and free for students, teachers and national servicemen.
Flashing our cards, we got in free. Heh, heh, heh.
It’s not a very large place but it’s still pretty detailed and compact in the information about the Malays of the past in Singapore. That’s a small scale model of Singapore before all the settlements and whatnot of traders came about.
It’s actually pretty interesting to learn because woaaah, we didn’t know it was going to help us lots in research for our steampunk anthology. For one thing, we had cannons. Hand held ones that’s probably mounted on something and secondly… WE ACTUALLY HAD STEAMPOWERED SHIPS. Unfortunately, it was said that the crew didn’t know how to man those ships and thus they weren’t in good shape.
As you went from the first floor to the second, it gets from the Victorian times to the present. Just not our present, it’s still in the past. Ha ha ha.
There’s computers with little clips of archival footage! At one point, they also showed old movie clips. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the subbed version so I don’t know who’d understand it unless you know Malay. I know there’s subbed versions of it too since I’ve watched them on TV so perhaps the Malay Heritage Centre could update them eventually if they are able to. Besides the movie clips, everything else was actually in either English or Malay.
Although the movie set replica from Seniman Bujang Lapok is cordoned off, we managed to play around the area by having a looksee at the non-cordoned off area (duh). Groovy music where you can dance the twist was playing while the room looked like it was decorated in that era!
Oh yes, here’s the video of the scene that set replica was of! Mintea found the video clip of it since I forgot which movie it was exactly from!
I think we had fun most on the second floor. There were large scale replicas of how a kampung house was like and it definitely creaked like one when you stepped on it to get to another era of time.
And then as we stepped into the 80s-90s when people started living in HDB flats, we pretended we were visiting each other for Hari Raya. Bwuahahahaha. Ok, without the kueh since it was still Ramadhan then.
And that we were in a museum of sorts too.
BUT ANYWHO, it was fun! It’s actually much better to visit the centre and learn more things than wikipedia would have told us! If you go on a normal day or something you can probably go to the restaurant near the main building of the Malay Heritage Centre and have lunch there. We went on a supposedly quiet (in the end when we left, it wasn’t really quiet since scouts went about there for some excursion!) day so on other days there might be performances or batik painting etc. You best check out their website if you want to check out other extras.
As for us, we actually liked it! Also, it was nice to just sit around on the huts outside and officially lepak-ed*.
