One fine Saturday found us watching the movie Taken 2 in Plaza Singapura. We loved the movie and Dred and I agreed that Liam Neeson was dreamy, which bothered me because I have never been into old men before; ie. I never had a thing for Richard Gere.
“OMG is this another sign of aging?” I bewailed. (Is bewail a word? Oh look, there are no squiggly red lines under it, so it must be!)
The movie ended around dinner time, so we decided to look around for a nice place to eat. But before we could find a restaurant, someone got distracted by this sign on the ground floor:
And ended up buying these shoes. It was perfect because earlier on, I had been looking for nude pumps with platform soles. Well these aren’t exactly pumps but they do come close.
We were just supposed to head to The Cathay, but then someone mentioned wanting to eat somewhere where there was a live band and then someone mentioned Clarke Quay and then Dred mentioned that in her over two years of stay in Singapore, she had never been there, and so the next thing you know:
As we were walking around looking for a suitable place to dine in, we saw this street entertainer, some Japanese guy juggling crystal balls. Unlike your typical juggling act, his balls were also twirling around like some magical stuff, making everything seem surreal, like at any moment, we would be jolted awake from a dream.
We eventually found what seemed like a promising bar, a Scottish bar called Highlander, and walked inside.
I thought they would have an entrance fee since the stage was set up for a band, but they didn’t, and that was such a happy surprise. We were ushered to a table by a Filipina waiter then a couple of Filipino waiters took our order. They were wearing kilts which we thought was cute, so we asked to have a picture with one of them. Haha. Pardon the quality of the photo, it was dark in there.
We ordered a couple of meals to share – the Highlander sampler and salmon + haddock fish pie. We loved almost everything on the plates except a weird-tasting morsel on the sampler. I do not know its name. Then Dred and I ordered some champagne-based cocktails. She had a peach something (schnappe?) while I had a mimosa, simply because I always read that drink and have never tried it. It’s actually champagne with orange juice, and isn’t bad at all. Unfortunately, my cellphone died before I could take a picture of any of it, so all I can show you is the table settings:
At around 10pm, the band came in and started to sing onstage. Their female vocalist had a very powerful voice and they sang modern songs, which we liked.
I wanted to dance, but my two friends were quite shy to do so, so after a while I quit pulling them to the dance floor and just danced beside our table. But after some time, dancing by myself felt rather weird, so I stopped and sat down at the table and just sang along with the band instead.
We all liked the bar’s ambiance, though, and I said that we might have found our McLaren’s. In the show How I Met Your Mother, you see, the gang has their go-to bar called McLaren’s. I said we should definitely hang out here more.
Sure enough, the next Friday, we were back, and this time, my friends actually danced on the dance floor with me, and so did a few strangers haha. This time we ordered vodka cranberry, because I remember Barney mention it once on HIMYM.
We left after the band’s second set and on our way to the bus stop, we passed by a bar called BB near the reverse bungy site.
There was an acoustic act and I wanted to listen plus my feet were killing me in my high heeled pumps, so we sat down on a bench and enjoyed the performance while sipping from our bottles of Aquarius energy drink that we had bought from a vendo machine.
And I said, “Hey, we just found a cheap way to hang out in Clarke Quay! We should do this more often.” LOL.
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