Ever since we had kids, we never failed to give Chinese Garden a miss during Lantern Festival. Still remembered the first time we came here was in Sep 06 when Jovin was barely 1 and the theme then was Seven Wonders of the World. Following which, we brought Jovan to enjoy the ambience too in Sep 08. Still remembered we enjoyed ourselves a lot that year as the theme was Hello Kitty at F1 races. The kids really loved the brightly lit lanterns and Hello Kitty decor then. However to our disappointment, it did not organise any lantern exhibtion for the past 2 years. So we switched to Chinatown instead.
This year, Chinese Gardens is back at the Lantern Festival once again with its theme: The World of Legends. However, this year, we managed to organise as a combined family gathering with our best couple pals. Well, credit goes to the 2 wives inadvertently who were so dilligently checking up on our timings and schedules, activities and even settled the dining place!
We arranged to meet for dinner at the nearby Taman Jurong Food Centre. We are all northern residents, so it's our first visit in this vicinity. Our hubbies settled the food ordering and we had simple hawker fare. Kids mingled and were rather cooperative during dinner time. All of us were so excited and even decided to make this an annual thingy between the 2 families, hehe...
After dinner, we proceeded to Chinese Garden. It was only the 2nd day, so there wasn't much crowd. However, many stalls were still not opened yet but the kids enjoyed walking and running along the trek. The 2 wives were carrying much barang but kudos to the 2 obedient hubbies who were our porters for the night, haha! See below pictures and u will know what I mean....
As night falls, we chose a spot to light up our lanterns. Jovin and Jovan had their respective Disney Princess and Ben-10 lanterns while Kaden had his Doraemon bubble lantern! Each of them walked with their lanterns, but it was really challenging to capture a combined shot of the 3 kids, think only managed to catch these 2 precious shots as we couldn't get all to cooperate at one time. Nonetheless, good attempt :)
We commented the theme wasn't that suitable and understandable for young kids like ours. Even secondary school kids nowadays are so weak in their knowledge on Chinese ancient tales like 后羿射日、神农尝百草etc. I doubt even my dearest pal Junwei can understand haha.... Nonetheless, the colourful lightings and brightly lit decor did capture our kids's attention. It wasn't easy to get Kaden to pose too unless Tingting is with him. He just loved to run around instead of being 'hijacked' for photo-shoot, hehe...
The main highlight of the stroll was none other than the funland. We intially spent $10 worth of tokens for each to take a ride on their choice of rides, but Kaden too took a liking to the Merry-go-round which Jovin and Jovan took. So Junwei bought another $10 tokens and the 3 took the ride together. The kids were thrilled and Jovin was 'assigned' to sit beside Kaden to take care of the youngest Kaden.
As compared to previous years, I found that the scale wasn't as massive and the decor was so much lesser. Guess it's all replaced by the fireworks display? Somethng different this year was the fireworks performance at 9p.m. We chose a great spot and watched the though not-so-spectacular fireworks show. Jovin and Jovan were appalled but Jovin commented," Mummy, why isn't there big pattern like in Hong Kong?" Haha, guess the Hong Kong Disneyland's fireworks must have left a deep impression in our princess's heart.
It was lucky that the weather was in our favour. It was a pleasant outing after all since the kids had much fun and of course, we adults took the opportunity to chit-chat and plan for our next meet-up. Time really flies. To think that this is already the 3rd time we brought the kids here for Lantern Festival and only came to realise how much our little 'J's have grown over the years. They still looked so small then hehe....
Believe on actual Lantern Festival, we would bring the kids to my sis's place for our very exclusive family lantern festival celebration where we would lit up the lanterns, parents would sit and enjoy mooncakes and pomelo at a corner etc. Hmmm, this reminds me it's really time to choose and buy mooncakes. Looking forward to the actual day :)
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