Walking over to City Hall MRT station tonight, I heard the telltale sirens of a Traffic Police motorcycle squad coming down Bras Basah Road behind me. Next thing I knew, there were individual cops pulled up at the intersection with North Bridge Road and frenetic waving ensued to keep the way clear.

I don’t know who was in this VIP delegation, but there sure were a whole lotta white Mercedes-Benzes with SZ licence plates, flanked by a few other shiny white cars and trailed by a less glamorous-looking minibus. Pockets of Traffic Police on motorcycles came in their wake, and it took a good amount of time to all go past and pull into Raffles the Plaza.

Beside me, as we waited to cross Bras Basah Road, a woman speculated to her companion, “Last time IMF also like that — whole road closed. Donno who this is.” And a few moments later, the addendum: “Take so long.”

It took 2-3 changes of the traffic lights before the entire procession had cleared the road and the cops allowed traffic to proceed as per normal. But I guess Singaporeans are an impatient lot because vehicle horns had started sounding along the blocked North Bridge Road a while before that.

Blah blah blah processioncakes.

As I mentioned a few days ago, all the Orchard Road Xmas decorations are coming up already. Raffles City’s Xmas tree’s possibly still missing a couple of layers of branches (or maybe just lights), but I like the simplicity of it.