Singapore is known as the garden city, and as I mentioned the first week of this series, I kinda felt like I had seen them all. Well, wouldn’t you know it… but the city had more to show me once I started really digging around (including a brand new one that I’ll show you in a couple of weeks)! My friend Karen, who lives in Singapore, had recommended I go to the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple when I was last in the country, however I never found time to make it there. This time though, I made it there, and it ended up being just down the street from my hotel. What I didn’t know going into it was there is a really neat garden on the roof!
Though I’m not a Buddhist myself, I do enjoy going to Buddhist temples while I’m in Asia, just to experience a different aspect of the various cultures. The temples themselves are generally representative of some aspect of the culture’s architecture, and though many end up looking the same, the nuance differences can be quite interesting and beautiful. The Buddha Tooth Relic Temple in Chinatown was no different, and actually while I was visiting there was some sort of worship event happening (do they call them worship services? I’m honestly not sure), which was an added treat to get to see and hear (though I’ve no idea what they were saying). The temple itself is several stories tall (you can see it in the bottom left of last week’s Picture of the Week) and as I was exploring the different floors, I saw that there was a garden on the roof, so I admittedly skipped a few floors and went up to the top. It was beautiful in its simplicity! In the very center was a giant prayer wheel (you can see it through the door of the little building in the center of the above photo) and then a square walk way went around the edges, with beautiful plants and flowers everywhere in between. I loved the way these pathways led the eyes straight to the prayer wheel, surrounded by these wonderful plants!
–Dan Thompson