Side Quest: The MRT Project

Beginning at the end of the line

As I am prone to do, I recently gave myself a new project while making the mistake of announcing it out loud in front of my daughter as we rode the train home from Chinatown last week.

As I continue explore what belonging means to me, especially as an American immigrant living in Southeast Asia, I recently started wondering what it’s like around each little dot on the SMRT (Singapore Mass Rapid Transit) map.

So here’s my challenge. Visit every stop on the MRT and spend at least one hour wandering around the neighborhood to look, listen, smell or taste what I might find. And because I want to keep growing as a writer, this is a writing assignment, to try and capture and share what it is like for this aging gal to explore this young country.

Fair warning, I’m prone to getting very excited about new writing projects and then abandoning them well before they are done: a queer lectionary blog, Celtic wheel of the year reflections, monthly Celtic tree oracle card posts on Instagram, and even a couple of half-written books that are lovingly lurking on my hard drive.

But onward to my new side quest, The MRT Project!

Sunday, March 1, 2026: Bayshore (TE29)

After a morning in Chinatown with B, and at her encouragement, I rode our folding bike to Siglap station to head one just stop east. I’m still getting the hang of our folding bike, which has developed a habit of popping open and slicing into my shins just as station attendants round a corner to remind me that, it fact, it has to be folded to ride the train.

Bayshore is, for now, the easternmost stop on the Thomson East Coast Line. The station sits on land that, not so long ago, was sea. In a relatively short time, Singapore has expanded its land area by about 25 percent through reclamation. Sand becoming shore. Shore becoming neighborhood. Neighborhood becoming transit hub.

I’ve been riding the Thomson–East Coast Line - also known as the Brown Line - for the past seven months, only visiting a few stops along the way and never making it all the way to the end of the line.

Beyond “my” Brown Line, there are five other lines, spanning, crossing, and circling 240 kilometers of track on an island only about 50 kilometers wide. More than 150 stations. Fully automated trains gliding with quiet precision, stopping hundreds of times a day to move six million people across this small but determined nation.

So yesterday I started my little project and, after clumsily getting into the lift, down to the platform, onto the train, off the train, back onto the lift, and out of the concourse, I emerged with my bike reassembled, only two deep scrapes on my legs, and rolled around the Bayshore station.

Here is home to a preschool and a nursing home, a seafood restaurant and landed houses, and condos that look like huge white and pastel lego creations.

Also at Bayshore there is easy access to an underpass that takes pedestrians, cyclists, skaters and dogs galore under the ECP motorway into the East Coast Park.

I rolled out of the underpass tunnel between a skate park and a dog park and could see the Bedok Jetty just to the left across the footpath.

A hot and steamy Sunday (not that there are any other kind of Sundays in Singapore), the park was bustling with picnicking groups, families pedalling covered bikes built for 4, couples lounging under the gracefully twisted branches of old rain trees and fashionable teens wearing significantly too many clothes for a beach situated so close to the equator.

I rode down the jetty and dismounted to occupy a bench so I could watch young men in black hoodies and old women in rainbow tennis visors fish from the pier with live bait. There were kids riding wobbly bikes with boom boxes playing KPop music and old uncles toddling down the shore at a snail’s pace.

I stopped counting at 100 ships in the watery parking lot, waiting their turn in the shipping lane just off shore.

And though I could see airplanes taking off from Changi airport, I could barely hear them!

The whole scene, with so many things going on, was both vibrant and soothing.

Then with the breeze from the East Coast Food Village wafting in my general direction, my tummy began to pull me like a cartoon character away from the pier and back in the direction of home. B met me at the food village, bringing Butterbean on her bike, so we could enjoy satay and soursop juice for dinner.

Okay, that’s all for this first foray into the MRT Project. I’m imaging the rest of the posts taking on a structure something like: Where I Went, What I Noticed, What I Wonder.

If you’d like to read more of these posts, please let me know by dropping a line in the comments.

See you at the next station.

Some links about the SMRT

https://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltagov/en/getting_around/public_transport/rail_network.html

https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/vol-13/issue-1/apr-jun-2017/land-from-sand/