Zit Seng's Blog

A Singaporean's technology and lifestyle blog

Playground at 313

I’ve been on the hunt for playgrounds. Particularly, indoor playgrounds that are preferably reasonably centrally located. It’s so that I’ve somewhere to bring the kids to. It’ll be good if there were other things like shopping or food located in the same place so that there’s something for me to do. Oh, free (as in no cost), of course.

In the central town area, I’ve been going quite regularly to Paragon and Marina Square. Both have indoor kid’s playground. But even though the kids don’t mind it, the adults get tired of visiting the same places over and over again. So I’ve been looking out for other similar destinations to go.

One recent evening, after consulting the Internet and finding this list of top 10 shopping mall playgrounds, I found there was a third destination to visit within the “central town area”. That place is 313@Somerset.

I’m not a regular visitor to 313@Somerset, so I never realized there was a playground. It’s located at the “sky terrace”, which turned out to be on the 5th storey, which is where the food court is located. I’ve only been to the food court once (even though I’ve been on that level several times due to changing elevators to get to the car park), but I’ve never noticed a playground, let alone a sky terrace.

Anyway, with the new knowledge about the existence of the playground, this time I had my eyes peeled open to look out for it. There weren’t any signage about the playground or sky terrace. But well, it wasn’t too difficult once you try to look out into the general direction of the front of the building. You’ll see several doors along the length of the building. Outside those doors is the sky terrace.

My idea of a sky terrace is, well, a big roof top garden. This one wasn’t quite like that. It’s more like a narrow ledge that stretches across the front of the building. There’s the garden bit along most of its length. Then, toward one end is a simple playground.

To an adult, this isn’t a very exciting playground. There were no slides. There was nothing to climb. Nothing to hang from. But children will always love playground, and Vanessa and Ian were both quite happy about it. I’m quite surprised.

On second thought, it’s good that there’s nothing to climb or hang from. The only thing separating us on the sky terrace from the 5-storey drop beyond the edge is a glass parapet wall. People who have a height phobia will want to keep away from the glass parapet.

The far end of the playground, however, did have something interesting. It’s sort of an interactive electronic game. It makes sounds, displays multicoloured lights, and there are large buttons arranged on four pillars that serve as “input” controls to play a variety of games. You can even choose one or two player games. Look at the photo above to get a better idea of what I’m talking about.

Being the gadget person that I am, I was attracted to this game. The kids were too. There were three of us playing as one player. I think if you really play this on your own, it will get quite tiring pretty fast.

Either hardly anyone knows about this playground at all, or it isn’t very popular. Throughout the whole time we were there, we were all on our own. Not a single other soul. Not anywhere else on the entire sky terrace too.

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