The Road to ISMRM Singapore 2016: Little India

I hope that many of you are in the process of planning your trips to Singapore. In addition to some news about the meeting itself, I thought I would take this opportunity to tell you about some other corners of Singapore. In many ways, Singapore has been successful over these years by bringing together many different Asian cultures into a relatively small area. Inside the city there are even smaller areas with dense concentrations of the individual cultures that make up modern Singapore. I’ve already written about Chinatown. Here I’d like to show you some images from one of my other favorite areas of the city: Little India.

Obviously this is the center of Indian culture in Singapore. I personally had real trouble walking past all of the amazing-looking restaurants in this part of the city… I wanted to eat at all of them! We did stop and have a wonderful tea. Instead of using ice, the shopkeeper poured the tea from one canister into another to cool it off. On this hot day, it tasted amazing! I think I may have had three…

Another amazing place to visit in Little India is the Mustafa Centre. As you may know, I live in the middle of the US, and so I’m pretty used to being in big stores that sell lots of different things, but the Mustafa Centre is a whole other experience that makes our big stores look small and calm. The story of how this place came to be goes something like this: in the early 1980s Mohamed Mustafa had a small clothing shop. Through a series of events he had enough money to buy the store next door. Everyone said, “If this continues, he’s going to own the whole block!” Well, 30 years later, he does, and it’s amazing! You can get everything from clothes to electronics to groceries from all over the world. It is densely packed and seems to go on forever.

Down below I made a time lapse video of one of my walks through one floor of the Centre at mid-day. It takes a really long time to get from one end to the other! For all of us who will have really ugly jet lag in Singapore, it’s also useful to know that this is one of the few places that’s open 24 hours. So if you need a walk, a snack and maybe a new camera at 3AM, Mustafa Centre is the place to go.

I hope that you are all having a good time getting prepared for the meeting! As always, keep en eye on the ISMRM homepage for the most up to date information. I look forward to seeing you in Singapore!

— Mark