This blog post is part of the Random Sampling Singapore project. The Project aims to sample 100 places on the island of Singapore over a one year period in order to gain an unbiased and holistic view of the city state.

On the 11th August 2021 I walked with my family and Ryan Teoh, a Cyber Security specialist from Malaysia to hunt the coordinate #38 and #43. We started at Science Center in Jurong East. Coordinate #38 was located at the former golf course behind the Jurong Town Hall. We hoped the golf course is accessible from the street, but instead of an entrance we found a little “Dato Kong” temple down the road. The temple was colorful decorated and there were Taoist gods as well as Hindu gods. Ryan explained us the meaning of this very special kind of temples. “Dato” and “Kong” both means “grandfather” in Malay and Hokkien (a Chinese dialect) and those temples are build to worship all the spirits of the land.

My eye got stuck to a beautiful Hanuman statue. I felt this day would become a good day. A friendly man came out of the temple and offered us some refreshments and asked us to not publish any photographs of the temple. At home I sketched the statue on the iPad.

Refreshed and blessed we moved on to find coordinate #38. We walked along the fence next to Jurong Town Hall and found Sago-Seeds dropping from Coral Wood Trees.

We came close to the point as the pathway ended at an overhead bridge. As we couldn’t reach the point directly, we climbed up the steps to reach the top of the bridge from where we could spot the pond of the neglected golf course next to #38.

The idyllic scenario made us forget that we were next to the super busy AYE highway.

I gave Ryan my sample kid and asked him to watch out for samples. He immediately recalled that he saw a snake skin on one of the stairs, that nobody else of us recognized.

With tweezers Ryan and Sven tried to pull off the snake skin from a corner between two stairs. Carefully they put the almost transparent snake skin into a sample container.

I asked Ryan to name the sample, after pausing for a moment he wrote on the container “A new beginning!”.

Artwork

In progress..