Chingay Parade

A couple weekends ago, I attended the Chingay Parade.  Apparently the word "Chingay" is an anglicized version of a Hokkien word that means "the art of costume and masquerade".  The original Chingay began in Penang (Malaysia) and the tradition worked it's way south through Johor Bahru (border city) to Singapore.  Because everything in Singapore has to be advertised as the best or largest of something or other, Chingay is promoted as "the biggest street parade in South East Asia"!

As I've said before, my camera sucks at night so it was kind of hard to take pictures.  I tried taking some of the floats when they would stop midroute - they were really absolutely ridiculous.  Huge, gaudy, and often inexplicable.  A lot of them had national themes.  Here is the Japanese float:

The Chinese float seemed to have some sort of odd theme that we didn't really get:

The weirdest part was that there were people in those yellow boxes on top of the float.  We expected them to pop out of the boxes in some sort of grand finale, but they didn't.  They just stayed inside and wiggled around a bit instead.

There were also a lot of Singapore themed floats.  The Housing Development Board, or HDB, turned 50 this year, so there were several floats celebrating this milestone.

This is, of course, supposed to be a bunch of people from different racial/ethnic/economic backgrounds, all living happily together in harmony in an HDB building.

So, I understand the birthday cake, and I understand the lion (Singapore is the "lion city") but why is the cake in the middle of the lion?!?

Finally, there was this guy.  His float was somehow associated with a  Universal Studios theme park that is opening soon, but I was laughing too much at this guy to really pay attention to the rest of the float.