Ran 7 miles at East Coast Park to the Chingay Parade

Saturday, 24 February 2018

I love Saturday's in Singapore because it means sleeping in, video chatting with friends and family, and exploring the city with Bren!  This morning I Facetimed with Rebecca and her parents who were in Atlanta from St. Simons for the weekend.  I also went out for a walk and to pick up some breakfast bread treats for Bren and I.  The flowers below are bougainvillea (thanks Elizabeth for identifying them for me) and they are everywhere here, and so beautiful!

I worked on my inquiry project, read up about the next school I'll be starting at Monday, and caught up on emails and tasks from my school in Atlanta.  Later in the afternoon, Bren and I headed down to East Coast park.  Our plan was to run about 7 miles down the coastline and end near the Chingay Parade.  We didn't buy the expensive tickets to the parade, but were hoping to stand on the street in the "free section" towards the end of the parade route.  I had heard from collegues that the parade would be full of vibrant floats, dancing dragons and lions, stilt walkers, wushu masters (Chinese martial arts), and performers of many different ethnicities in their traditional costumes.  We ran our 7 miles down the trail at East Coast Park and then ended on the opposite side of the river from where the parade had started.

The park area was closed off because of the proximity to the fireworks so we went up on a bridge that turned out to be awesome!  The bridge went over the river, but also provided a perfect "sky" view of the Chingay Parade.  This event is the largest street performance and float parade in Asia and epitomises the dynamism of Singapore's vibrant and multicultural society.  The word Chingay is equivalent to the Mandarin zhuang yi (妆艺), which means "the art of costume and masquerade" in the Hokkien dialect.  The first street parade took place on 4 February 1973.  In 1987, Chingay featured its first foreign group when the city's main English newspaper, The Straits Times, sponsored four pop singers from Tokyo.  Since then, the event has extended invitations to international artists and troupes.  Today, Chingay has become a uniquely Singaporean Lunar New Year tradition, held during the first weekend of the Lunar New Year.  It was such a fun event to see and the fireworks at the end were awesome from up on the bridge!