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I Followed My Heart And It Led Me Here.
Published: 16.10.2026
I Followed My Heart And It Led Me Here.
I followed my heart, and it led me here.
This saying on a house wall on Joo Chiat Road in Singapore piqued my curiosity alongside the other wall designs in this street. Interestingly, I was near here once at the end of March 2020 in the Katong neighborhood, where I visited the Eurasian Heritage Gallery on Ceylon Road and the Peranakan Houses on Koon Seng Road, which you can read and see here: Katong.
We start at the Marine Parade MRT Station and walk along Joo Chiat Road heading north. The walkway to the shopping mall i12 Katong is covered. These covered walkways in Singapore are brilliant for sun and rain protection and can be found all over the city.
In front of the mall, there is a large advertising campaign by the car manufacturer Xpeng for its electric car Mona L03, in which I recently took a seat at the auto show in Cangzhou, you can read about it here: China : At Ease 29 - At the Auto Show (2).
The special feature of Joo Chiat Road in the coming section is the numerous old and colorful shophouses, a popular colonial architecture in Singapore that features a colonnade.
The first mural on such a shophouse is a rather colorful one; I can't find any depiction in it, but maybe I just lack the imagination for it.
Then we encounter an elephant from the legendary Elephant Parade, whose sculptures I already met in Little India in 2020, as I show in this photo video (from minute 1:19): Little India.
Here, however, is a shop where you can buy the colorful elephant figures in various sizes, even a green Mahjong elephant.
We continue our walk, and the next mural is located at the Community Club.
Across the street, the 'Oktobeerfest' (no typo!) is currently being celebrated.
I, of course, have to photograph the cat mural with the sign of the language school 'Miss Cat's Mandarin'.
A tree seems to be really growing out of a nature mural.
Then we come to the above-mentioned saying that attracted me to the street in the first place.
Tom and Jerry make their spectacular appearance right across from here.
At Kuan Im Kuan Ti Kong Temple, we encounter these two phoenixes, which surely flew out of some ashes.
Now I realize that we have walked too far since my goal is actually Painted Rainbows Road, a colorfully painted path. However, the turn-off between the rows of houses is rather inconspicuous. So we walk a few meters back and turn into the narrow alley.
However, this alley is not as spectacular as all the internet photos suggest. On the left side, there is a small window where a nice woman sells coffee from her kitchen.
She cleverly took advantage of the fact that potential customers walk all the way here through the colorful alley. She affixed a Chinese guardian saying from Tai Mountain on the facade of her house. I, of course, wouldn't have known that, but my wife translated the plaque for me.
The sacred mountain 'Taishan' is only about 220 km south of our home in Cangzhou.
At the end of the colorful street, large areas of vibrant colors have been painted on the wall of the house.
Finally, our heads spin from all the vivid colors, and we walk through a quiet side street to the next bus stop. From there, we take the bus back to Marine Parade.
We lived there for a month in 2022, so the surroundings feel very familiar to us. However, the area was a big construction site back then since the metro line was still under construction four years ago.
Today, the surroundings are very beautifully arranged again, and we celebrate our return to 'our' hawker center with lunch and a freshly squeezed juice because I still remember the juice stand from back then.
In the next blog post, I will dive into the historical Chinese life in Singapore.
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