Biggest Belly Dance

I love the phrase "Biggest Belly Dance". It conjures hilarious images. But at this place, they mean something different than what I imagine. Anywho. We had lunch on Saturday in the Arab Quarter of Singapore. This is a place where some of the architecture is actually old, there is amazing food of the middle eastern variety, and you can buy lots and lots of carpets.


I had mint tea.

Dave had Turkish coffee and muhalahba (?) for dessert. We were so hungry we forgot to take a picture of our mixed mezze lunch.

We wandered through the markets in the Arab Quarter and I bought a pretty necklace.

The buildings there are really strikingly different from the rest of Singapore.

We continued walking and passed the "Children Little Museum", where Dave greeted the welcome robot (much like the Biggest Belly Dance, I'm not sure where to put the emphasis on the Children Little Museum. Are the children little, or is the museum? We did not venture inside to find out).
We then happened upon the Malay Heritage Centre, which was, as you can see from Dave's expression below, hot.

Dave took a break to figure out where we were, and I snapped the photo. Can you see me?

We walked by the Abdul Gaffoor Mosque:

And into Little India, where some kind of festival was happening! I have no idea what was going on here, but each of these little chalk drawings had a burning pot on it, and some of these pots were accompanied by a separate little pot of creamy rice, that was being served to people on sheets of brown paper. There's a rice pot near the guy bending over. Anybody know what this was? [Dave - This is apparently the Tamil harvest festival of "Pongal", at which you celebrate by cooking rice with milk and sugar.]
We then found the Sri Veeramakaliamman Temple. If you can zoom into this photo, you should. It is GORY. There is a lion eating a guy on the bottom.

And that was just the back of the temple. Here's the front.

Of course, right on time, as soon as we arrived, it started raining. Notice all the people's shoes getting soaked.

So we walked where we could under awnings. And kept seeing posters of this woman wearing what looks like a very thick bodysuit under hotpants.
Eventually, we just got a cab home. In the cabs, I have been meaning to tell you, but keep not taking the photo, there are seating limits, as elaborated below. A single taxi can carry either 4 adults, 3 adults and 2 children, 2 adults and 3 children, 1 adult and 4 children, or 6 CHILDREN!! Can you imagine that taxi ride? Who gets seatbelts??


After some showers at home, we went out and got dinner and beers at the harbor. Excuse me, harbour.


And we saw a man and his little kids lighting this lantern that flew away into the air. No pictures of the flying away part. Just imagine it.