Ethel Reflections : National Museum

The visit to the National Museum was a whole new experience for me, and for us, given the fact that we people hardly go to the museum for an outing. Despite the rarity, we enjoyed ourselves very much from the very start to the end.

We met at the some fast food restaurant at Plaza Singapore for lunch on a Sunday afternoon (I know our theme should go about World War II since that's what we were given. Other groups were luckier 'cause they could indulge in food related to their theme (like the prata and what have you). But, you can't expect us to feed on sweet potatoes and plain porridge just so to fit into our theme right) Soo.. there you go - we had KFC and then we fell in love with the egg tart!

The hot scorching sun did not deter us from walking what seemed like 1000000km from PS to the National Museum. Being us, we walked about the lobby of the National museum trying really hard to spot the ticketing counter for our free ticket. We were THIS kiasu, alright, maybe just me. I was frantically asking everybody if they brought the CS card so as to be granted free entry. But the ticket was merely 5 bucks! Whatever.

When we entered the exhibition hall, we were greeted by a lady who distributed this 'companion', how tech-savvy huh. Accompanied by our 'companions', we made our way through the door and that marked the start of our visit to the museum.

We walked through the 'dark alleys' and our very first stop was the history of Singapore: pre-1819. The entire exhibition displayed artifacts found during the pre-1819 to prove that there was indeed a civilization back then. Whatever it is, we scanned through these exhibition quickly and made our way to the World War II exhibition which left the greatest impression this trip.

The most attention seeking feature of this exhibition would be what-seems-like-a-hundred bicycles mounted on the wall. Without any knowledge of what happened during the World War, my very first thought of those bicycles was that they were there for the sake of having an arty-farty effect on the museum. But of course, I was educated with the knowledge that that was what the Japanese used to cross the causeway to Singapore.

The other thing which I learned about was the painful experience people were put through during the world war II. Very heart-wrenching indeed. The one the left the greatest impression in my head was the Sook Ching massacre; how people were put through such unfair scrutinization and test to see if they were anti-japanese. In my mind when I saw how these people were treated so unfairly, I was questioning the intelligence of the Japanese soldiers. But they wasn't really a standard procedure that the Japanese soldiers followed, they judged by their gut feeling. If they liked you, you were lucky and set free but if they don't you would be put to death by the shooting squad. That was how ridiculous the Sook Chin massacre was. Whatever it was back then, the people who went through this torture would just have to rely on their fate to bring them through these 2 years.

We ended our memorable trip to the museum was yet another meal. Again, it wasn't anything close to the World War II theme we were given :) But we were very well satisfied after a thought-provoking trip to the museum.