SCIENCE CENTRE!!!

Fulfilled my avuncular duties again this Sunday by taking Kimberlyn out to the Science Centre - she's been begging to go for ages, but her family felt the Sabbath would be better spent mugging for midyear exams.


I'd tried to tempt her with the fact that the Peranakan Museum was holding the last weekend of its Opening Festival, but 'twas not to be. The little scullion even told me that she wants to be a scientist when she grows up, and her newfound idol is Marie Curie. (I'm rather relieved; last time I asked, it was St. Catherine.)

Lookit how tech-savvy the post-millennials are.  This is Li'l Kim with her cameraphone:



And with her handheld electronic diary:

I was trying to describe this state of tech to my 83 year-old grandmother at lunch. "Did you have PDAs when you were 9 years old?" I asked her in shaky Mandarin.

Ooh, yes, and there were also exhibits.  I was shamefaced when I couldn't explain to Kim what a diode or transistor were.  I was, however, able to tell her that Alexander Graham Bell's mother was deaf, and that eggs only hatch into fluffy baby chicks if the hen had sex first.  We played with optical illusions and the Tower of Brahma and the Archimedean screw (oh god, everything sounds like an innuendo on this blog) and the vortex generator and the phenakistescope andthe 3-dimensional Mobius strip.

Here's Kim on a parasaurolophus.

And here's the Ecstasy of St Theresa.

She loves dinosaurs (so did I when I was nine!), but unlike me, she doesn't try and memorise the roots of their Baroquely Hellenophone names.  (She does, however, plot over how to steal dinosaur eggs when the surveillance cameras are off.)

Ooh, and these are the hissing cockroaches:


They were right next to the cute lickle gerbils! (Kim was grossed out, but was amusedly tolerant of my fascination with them.)

We went to see a rather cool Omnimax Theatre movie on Egyptian mummies (how do they get all those people to do those re-enactments? And those were some dead-ass mummies on the iMax screen.) And later we came out and saw this weird hermaphroditic toy at the Gift Shop.

Anyway, my basic report is: the Science Centre is just as cool as it was when we were kids (and they're a lot closer to reaching  a million saga seeds in that big tube of theirs!), a bit shabby at times but slightly refurbished with most of the old stuff we loved still there or just shifted around.

Next time, she wants me to take her to the Singapore Discovery Centre.  Sigh.  The Peranakan Museum will have to wait.