Travelling again

Let me bore readers, as I do the people I live and work with, by once again extolling Singapore as a destination.

Last night, in one side street of Katong, I was taking a post late dinner* stroll down a side street which featured this house with its traditional (I assume Taoist) Chinese alter clearly visible along with photogenic cat):

Then perhaps 10 m further down the road is the back of a Hindu temple built in 1875, with some guys still in the hall where they serve food.  Barely another 10 m was a house with a prominent Islamic symbol above the carport, and then just a little further was St Hilda's Anglican Church, a relative latecomer from 1934.

Earlier in the day, I used my unlimited travel pass to ride the MRT subway for an hour to the north of the island to visit a Buddhist monastery, just on a whim because its website had a fair bit of English and it sounded a bit missionary in intent.  The building is not old, the decoration inside is a bit on the gaudy side, but there were two staff who said photos were fine, and one middle aged guy praying:

 

He finished, then approached me, and spent a good half hour chatting about the temple, the statues and Buddhism generally.  One of the staff gave me a juice to drink.  He was very surprised that I had come to this rather far flung (for Singapore) part of the island just to visit a temple that is not on the tourist trail.  (When I was telling my daughter about it, she said something like "well, you're not exactly like a tourist anymore, you've been there so often." Ha ha.)

Anyway, the day made me fully realise something that I probably always knew at a subliminal level: as a person who started reading about comparative religions in my early 20s, and in recent years had interest revived by Religion for Breakfast on YouTube and a desire to better understand Buddhism and SE Asian religious syncretism generally, it's no wonder I have always been drawn to a small city state that has accommodated (like no other place in the world I can think of) such successful religious multiculturalism.  

That is all...

* Dinner was Indian, which I had twice this visit in a small cafe with Indian/Sri Lankan staff who have both an Indian meal menu and a separate menu of Chinese cafe staples.  I would normally avoid a place that has alternate cuisines,  but their food was very good.