More Singapore Tourism

Chris arrived in Singapore last week, and we had a little over a day to spend in Singapore, so we had time to see a couple fun tourist sites before we headed off to Vietnam.

First, we visited the Haw Par Villa, originally called the Tiger Balm Gardens.  The inventors of Tiger Balm were two brothers, Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par.  Although not originally from Singapore, the Aw brothers eventually settled here and in 1935 purchased the land on which the villa was constructed.  The gardens took two years to construct, and cost around two million (US) dollars to build!  According to wikipedia, the park "contains over 1,000 statues and 150 giant dioramas depicting scenes from Chinese folklore, legends, history, and illustrating various aspects of Confucianism".  Many of the statues in the park are supposed to teach children about traditional Chinese values and morals, especially the Ten Courts of Hell portion of the gardens.

The gardens have gone through several iterations over the years - for awhile in the early 90s, the gardens were converted into an amusement park with rides - but today they are in the process of being restored to their original state.  

Here I am getting ready to enter the Ten Circles of Hell:

The Ten Circles of Hell showed the different punishments that would befall various types of sinners in the afterlife.  The statues were incredibly gruesome, like this one!

Our favorite punishment was the one for prostitutes, who were to be drowned in a "filthy blood pond".

The rest of the statues depicted all sorts of different legends, myths, and stories.  Some had explanations posted, but for most, we were left to puzzle out what the stories behind the statues could have been.  For example, this lady with a crab head:

This rabbit vs. rat war was also one of the more confusing ones:

Also on display  was a "tiger car" owned by one of the Aw brothers at the height of their fortune.  The horn, of course, made a roaring noise!

Later that day, we visited the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, in Chinatown.  As the name would suggest, the temple contains a piece of a tooth from the Sakyamuni Buddha (this is the Buddha that most people just know of as "Buddha", but I guess there actually lots of Buddhas).  This temple is crazy!  The tooth relic is contained in a stupa (altar) made of solid gold, apparently weighing 420 kg.  There are also a total of 10,000 small Buddha statues around the temple.  Although the relic is from the Sakyamuni, or Supreme, Buddha, the temple is actually dedicated to the Maitreya Buddha, who is known as the "Future Buddha".  We weren't really sure of how this future Buddha thing worked, but we did enjoy imaginging a robotic future Buddha.  Here is the main shrine, with the Maitreya Buddha in the middle:

In the next couple posts, I'll be writing about our trip to Vietnam - but this may take while because, between Chris and I, we took several hundred pictures, so I need to sort through all those first!  But, it was a really awesome trip, and hopefully I can get all the pictures up on Picasa, and post a link here to see all of them.