Thursday, October 09, 2008

Maps of Singapore

I still recall the days when I need to locate an unfamiliar place in Singapore, I would turn to the popular and apparently hip website of Mighty Mind’s maps.

After Mighty Mind was embroiled in legal tussles with the Singapore Land Authority over the copyright issues of its online maps, the latter has wrested the top spot for online Singapore maps (just google for Singapore’s maps and you will get what I mean).

I have used the Singapore Land Authority’s street map website and I am full of compliments for it!

The website offers up-to-date, detailed, precise and colourful maps of Singapore’s streets and even allows the site visitors to save them as softcopy graphic files in their hard disks, provided they have agreed to its myriad regulations for use of the maps.

The site is also forward-looking: scroll down the drop-down bar under the ‘MRT/LRT Name’ description on the home page and names of MRT and LRT stations which sound funny or hmm… interesting greet you, these include:

Bakau LRT station: hmm why not ‘BaKua’?: the BBQ pork from ‘Lim Chee Guan’, ‘Bee Cheng Hiang’: a must-eat delicacy during Chinese New Year

Bangkit LRT station: sounds like ‘Banquet’: the Halal food court or ‘Bank it’ (many banks around the station? or even ‘Bang Kit’

Bartley MRT station: why not ‘Newater’: our Singapore’s pride or simply ‘Barley’?

Cove LRT station: make sure the LRT station is really in a cove!

Nibong LRT station: seems like, in future we can travel to Japan (Nippon) with our MRT

Pending LRT station: you mean the name of the station still pending or the station is pending to be built?

TongKang LRT station: reminds me of Tongkang Ali (the aphrodisiac for males)!

These names including few others are names of the MRT/LRT stations which will be rising up on our soils in the coming future. The authorities could really improve some of these names, I believe the scholars have no lack of choices of words that they could use with their superb (or seeming superb) knowledge of vocabulary!

This SLA website, together with the SBS website and SMRT website are a boon to Singaporeans planning their ways to unfamiliar places, making traveling in Singapore by public transport a cinch.

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