I am a massive fan of anything dinosaur. It is fascinating that creatures so giant and out-of-the-world looking existed for hundreds of millions of years in the past, we now get a glimpse of what some of them look like. I recalled years ago I read an online article that one British museum would exhibit dinosaur fossils, I had made a commitment to revisit the UK one day, which I did before the pandemic.
This T-rex is going to be on display in Singapore Victoria Concert Hall till Sunday. After which, it will be transported to Hong Kong for an auction. The open bid I’ve read is going to be above $100m.
Back to today’s adventure, I planned to do two things this weekend. One is to watch a Japanese movie called Wandering. Another one is to view this T-rex before it leaves Singapore.
I slept relatively early on Friday night. I had pizza. And the wine was good. On Saturday, I woke up at 4 am and could not go back to sleep!
Actually, I managed to fall back to sleep at 7 am and then, woke up at 9.30 am because the movie was screening at 10:55 am. Wandering is an arthouse movie. There were limited theatres that screened it. 10.55 am was the only timeslot and there were in total 3 people watching the show, including me.
My plan was to have McDonald’s breakfast. But by the time I left my apartment, it was 10:10 am. Fortunately, there are four buses to reach Funan. I reached the cinema 15 mins ahead of schedule. And my plan was to take a walk to Victoria Concert Hall after the show.
So I thought!
No. I went to the wrong cinema. It should be Plaza Singapura instead!
No time to waste, I called Grab transport. It took the driver 5 mins to pick me up and 10 mins to reach the correct cinema.
Phew. I made it. Just nice.
I will write about the movie in the next post. After the show, I had a really expensive burger meal at Five Guys. So expensive that I could only afford the burger (S$16.50!) and was unable to afford the fries and drink (S$13.50!). I mean, no way I am going to pay S$30 for fast food. Imagine I had a date. That would have cost me S$60. I felt thirsty after the meal. But no time to waste!
I took a train to Raffle Place and walked to Victoria Concert Hall where my friend T-Rex was. As expected, there was a really long queue for walk-in viewers. I have all the time in the world and didn’t mind the wait. There were two young female staff – very elegant looking, dressed in black suits and black dresses under a very warm sun – who approached the visitors and asked if any of us had registered online (and hence, skipping the queue). I wanted to joke with them that I was not a buyer and hence, did not register. I didn’t. I just replied that I was a walk-in. “One hour from here?” I asked. One of them replied, “Yes, likely.”
Looking back, the wait wasn’t that bad (compared to that British museum at the top of this post). Within half an hour, I entered the hall and met T-Rex.
My first impression was … “Shen” – also means god in Chinese – didn’t look that complete. I mean, the one at that British museum was one of the most complete T-Rex unearthed and restored. It is hard to say how much of “Shen” was reconstructed (usually there is a display on this info by the dinosaur fossil, a diagram showing real fossils versus reconstructed pieces). And his skull looked rather fractured.
“Shen” certainly looked fearsome. Thanks to the ringfencing of the parameter, it was rather easy to take pictures from all angles. Just that, because there were so many people, My iPhone kept on capturing photos of human heads inside T-Rex’s jaws.
Kind of funny.
I wanted to chill a bit more at the Singapore River. The weather was good. But it was 4 pm. I have to return home and walk the dog.