Aug. 20, 2011: Busy day today, with lots of walking done.
After Lola and I waited for our consumed breakfast of Nest
lé cereal and white bread to do its job (i.e. act as "nature's brooms") we headed out for Suntec to attend the Toy, Games and Comicon. The venue almost felt like overkill to me, as if RCBC Plaza in Makati decided to host our Manila Comicon instead of the usual soulless venues like SM Megatrade Hall. We got in pretty easily as next to no-one queued at the Internet Booking line.
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| 2 words: Re. Imbursable. |
The instant we entered Hall 401 we got freebies. Lola was also here on behalf of National Bookstore to purchase variant cover editions of certain comics, in this case several Issue One copies of
Captain America and
Flashpoint, both selling at S$15.00 each. Paul Levitz (picture not shown) was there on behalf of DC, but I wasn't that starstruck to have a picture taken w/ him or anything. Embarrassingly enough when Lola encountered a couple of her friends there, the guy w/ the camera named Carlo--whom Lola didn't introduce properly-- turned out to be
Carlo Pagulayan of
Incredible Hulk and
Agents of Atlas fame.
What disappointed about the whole event --aside from it having way too many toys and games and not enough comics-- was the lack of any $1 books, be they US or Singapore dollar. That was the main reason I wanted to come here, because Junius attended the Comicon 2 years ago and convinced me they existed. Instead I ended up just buying 5 comics for S$20, w/c in hindsight may have been too expensive for what were mostly Peter David
Supergirl comics.
But buy them I did, and then we stepped out of the 'Con and met w/ Glenn Tan, who's currently working here and had gone partially native, as he'd developed the Singaporean accent. All of us headed for the Din Tai Fung at Raffles City, where Marinette Uy (also living and working in Singapore) was waiting for us, w/ Joy Lua (Ng) catching up minutes later. Lola was oddly quiet as the 4 four of us went blabbing on about the how everyone else (especially other Ad Extremians) were doing. Glenn's planning to look for a less stressful job. Marinette is working for a competitor to China's alibaba.com, and Joy brought over the GingerSnaps children's clothing franchise w/ her from The Philippines.
After lunch Lola went to do some shopping while the rest of us continued out chat over coffee and doughnuts. The one thing the three of them agreed on was that life in Singapore will keep you busy enough to barely have a social life, and that if Something Bad happens you can be sure the local media will clean it up first before presenting it to the public, if they do at all.
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| Even melting watches are right twice a day. |
When the 'Nette and Joy had to go Glenn was gracious enough to stay with us for the rest of the day. He gave us a tour of Orchard Road, but at some point we got sick of seeing the same department stores over and over, so we crossed the
Helix Bridge on foot and and headed for the
ArtScience Mueseum at the
Marina Bay Sands to catch their
Salvador Dali Exhibit. After the exhibit I had a new-found respect for this surrealist jack-of-all-trides, as the Dali not only painted, but sketched, sculpted, photographed, and even designed furniture and
collaborated on a film w/ Alfred Hitchcock. Even though we only paid to see the Dali exhibit we caught a few glimpses of the one for Van Gogh down in their basement. As we were already there we went around Marina Bay, catching a glimpse of the Sands Casino, missed getting cheap seats to their stage production of The Lion King (instantaneous online seat reservations are the bane of people like me who physically waited in line for tickets), and waited even longer to get seats down at the food court. I had Turkish beef kebab, Glenn ordered Chinese
lechon kawali w/ noodles, while Lola had Thai noodles. A nice endcap to the evening was when we caught the last few minutes of their laser-light and water show called
Wonder Full. Feet were killing me by the time we got back to Beary Nice.
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