Anywhere Travel Guiding 2011 – One

2011 will be the year that I test run the Anywhere Travel Guide for myself, an ongoing project to see how it would enrich my experiences whether I was travelling or not.

*Sorry photos in this post are missing because for some reason I didn’t back them up when my photo server started charging me a ton of money to host them >_< Check out the rest of the Anywhere Travel Guiding Posts for better stories (complete with pix!)

ONE – 5th Jan 2011 (Wed) – 8pm-ish @Orchard Central

I managed to get off work early, yippee! I had about an hour to kill before my next appointment, so i whipped out my trusty guide, shuffle up the cards and pick a blue one (half the cards are red, the other half blue. I’ll have to ask Magda if there’s any significance, or perfectly arbitrary.)

I randomly decide to head to Orchard Central, at Somerset MRT and right in the middle of my journey. Also, I was totally craving the nutella milkshake from Everything With Fries, which would be my dinner.(If you’ve ever watched them make it, it’s an absolutely sinful concoction of ice cream, milk and nutella. SO good)

Here’s the card I drew! (EDIT: Yup, no idea what that is now I can’t find the picture)

 

Ok, perfect since I’m headed to a mall, I’m bound to find some boring shops eh? Well it turns out i’m very easily distracted. I walk into some really interesting shops and try on clothes instead. Focus! I can’t help it – I’ve always wanted to visit Reckless Ericka since it was at Stamford House, and I can never resist a Sale sign…

Right, this might be harder than i thought.

Orchard Central is pretty quiet on a weekday night – it has an unfortunately sprawling layout and too many hidden nooks, so you need to know where to find stuff – like Reckless Ericka, Blackmarket and Sabrina Goh in the far corner on the 2nd floor, or 2thenines in a farflung unit on the 5th floor… If you’re a fan of local fashion, these are good places to start!

But i digress. Boring shops, where are you?

What is a boring shop anyway? It’s kinda arbitrary, and entirely up to your judgement. I mean, if I didn’t like clothes, all the clothes shops would be considered boring as hell right? My definition of a boring shop is basically one I would never walk into normally.

 

The Singapore Mint.

Seriously, I never even knew they had retail outlets. My only knowledge of the Mint, other than printing our currency, is that people like to buy collector’s coins from them every Chinese New Year, and even then I thought they had to do it from the post office. I figured at most they might have a museum… but it turns out according to their website, they’ve always sold a whole bunch of premiums along with the usual coin stuff. Honestly, I never knew!

 

The store is hidden on the 2nd level near the Burger King, near the toilets and behind the walls near the escalator. It looks a lot like a jewelry/pawn store – just lots of glass display cases and it was empty when I found my way there. I wanted to take a picture but the store guy was looking at me kinda weird, so I skittered off instead, coward that I am~

But since the Chinese New Year is approaching, they were having a pretty big showcase down at the main atrium area, where I had the opportunity to browse more and look for the ‘Interesting Thing’ indicated in the card.

The Most Interesting Thing that I found in the ‘boring shop’?

 

I really want to know, who buys these things? S$60 for a fancy tiger tic tac toe set? Granted, it’s kinda cute, but… … …  It better bring me damn good luck~

And for good measure, here’s my Chinese Zodiac reading for the coming year:

I didn’t have a lot of time to really pore through everything, so I think I’ll head back some other time to see if I can find anything even weirder in this otherwise boring shop. I think this Anywhere Travel Guiding experiment has potential to be lots of fun, especially when I get the chance to test it overseas!

If anyone has their own ATG experiences, do drop me an email, I’ll be glad to hear from you!

See the full Anywhere Travel Guiding Series 2011