Research Connection

  It was a young Malay man in his early thirties, donning a songkok , who picked us up at our parents’ place at Taman Sentosa that morning in early December, 2022. He would be the Grab driver to bring us to the Red Square, where the iconic clock tower stood in the middle of old Malacca town. I Chun, Ethan and I were back in Melaka visiting Papa and Mummy- I hadn’t been back here for almost half a year, while I Chun and Ethan last saw my parents face to face when they visited Singapore three years ago, just before the pandemic. Papa wasn’t driving nowadays, fortunately however, Grab offered a convenient alternative for my parents to get groceries and meals (when Mummy wasn’t cooking) and of getting into town (when Mummy was line-dancing!) Today, it was our turn to Grab into town. Along the way, Ariff (not his real name) and I struck a rather lively conversation in Malay. He had initiated it, asking me where I was from and what I was doing in Melaka. Although he had picked us up from...

  Prologue In the month of December, 2021, I conceived a plan to walk across Singapore, from West Coast to East, all in a day. One may ask, why indulge in such an activity, when all it would achieve would be to tire oneself out? If the objective were to the East Coast, couldn’t it be more comfortably and much more quickly achieved by a means of transportation? Well, I had always enjoyed running as an entertainment as much as a form of physical exercise, being able to venture to new places and see Nature on route. Not being a marathoner, I knew that I would not have the ability to cover the distance required for a coast-to-coast effort by running. Furthermore, walking at a leisurely pace would allow me to see more of Singapore and appreciate its beauty in a way that I had never done before. I realized that a great challenge towards putting any sort of plan to practice was to commit to it, especially if it involved twenty or thirty kilometres of walking to the other side of Singa...