I’ve made a lot of false starts in my desire to get back to blogging, but if there was any reason to definitively get back in the saddle, it would certainly be so I could immortalize last Friday.
On Friday morning, I got the most random call from a friend. Seems she and some of her pals had planned to be at the Gardens on the Bay party that night, but they’d all missed their flight to Singapore. So now she had a spare VIP ticket to the Jason Mraz concert, and would I like to go?
Um, yes?
Admittedly getting there was a two-hour tango with unreliable cab line receptionists (two cabs that were supposed to show up didn’t) typically-awful Friday night traffic and a nasty driver that complained about us to us in Mandarin the whole way there.
But then we arrived and everything was ok. The open bar in the civilized, not-crowded, breezy VIP tent made it all better while effectively ruining me for life. I’m never going to be able to slum it on the grass again. Truth.
After the concert, we accepted a very gracious invitation from another friend to come by her Uncle’s restaurant, Pollen, and have a peek in the Flower Dome after closing hours. I really do have awesome friends.
To be honest, I’d already seen it earlier that week (before it was officially opened), but during the day. It was nice then, but in the whispering dark of night, it was magical. The first thing you notice is the nip in the air – it catches you off guard and, with the newness of the venue, fools you for a split second into thinking you’ve been transported very far away very suddenly.
We were, remarkably, the only ones there. No staff, no guards. It felt distinctly disobedient, running amok and unsupervised in the island’s newest bajillion-dollar attraction, and so from a mix of habit and being awestruck we kept our voices low. This had the heady effect of heightening everything that much more: the perfume of flowers in the air, the chill on our skin, the otherworldly beauty of a massive indoor forest in silent, stoic darkness.
You can imagine it took a Herculean effort on Adam’s part to get me to leave, but I was happy I did – on his way to the Gardens from work, he’d stashed a huge arrangement of peonies, roses and hydrangeas for me in the car as a surprise.
And so for the rest of the weekend, my room smelled just like the Flower Dome. How about that?
