Next year’s Chinese New Year will be very different.
Depending on whether Phase 3 has kicked in or not, you might not even get the chance to gather together in your grandmother’s house and play ban luck with your cousins.
And it’s not just that.
Chinatown’s Chinese New Year Bazaar
The Chinatown Chinese New Year Bazaar has been taking place every year since 1989 without missing a single year.
Typically held for three weeks, the bazaar is huge in size, typically held around the Pagoda, Smith, Temple and Trengganu streets.
The bazaar could attract as many as 900,000 visitors in good years.
If you’re looking forward to going to Chinatown during the festive season to soak in the festivities every year, you won’t be able to do that next year.
There Won’t Be Any Chinatown CNY Bazaar in 2021; First Time in History the Event is Cancelled
Next year, in 2021, people in Singapore no longer have a Chinese New Year bazaar to look forward to.
Organisers of the annual event said that crowd control is too big a concern to allow the event to go on.
The Kreta Ayer-Kim Seng Citizens’ Consultative Committee told reporters that while they had tried to think of alternative solutions, they eventually met a wall of uncertainties over when Phase 3 would kick in here in Singapore.
Shopowners Disappointed
Events and bazaars are the lifeblood of shops in places like Chinatown.
The massive annual event brings in an incredible amount of human traffic for shops in the area and it only happens once a year.
Shopowners in Chinatown were disappointed and upset with the update from the organisers.
Chinatown, which depends heavily on tourists coming into Singapore, already has a difficult year and the cancellation of the bazaar is yet another setback they have to brave through.
A lantern seller in the area, 60-year-old Jane Yee, lamented that sellers in the area is quite old and “don’t know how to sell things online”.
Even if they do, they face fierce competition from online wholesalers.
The Chinese New Year Festive Feels
Customers interviewed were also disappointed to hear that the annual Chinese New Year bazaar will not be taking place in 2021.
A customer who works at a travel agency said that without the bazaar, it’s hard to feel the Chinese New Year festivities in Singapore.
“The atmosphere will definitely be different… You really need to soak in the festive spirit at the market to feel like it’s Chinese New Year.”
Just out of curiosity, do you feel a pang of loss even though you yourself haven’t been interested in going to the CNY bazaar for the past ten years now?
If you do, you know it’s true what they say: You never know what you have until it’s gone.
A 34YO “old-virgin” S’porean was desperately looking for a boyfriend and surprisingly, she really found one online. But the intentions of the man will make you cry. Prepare tissue paper to watch this video based on real events:
But then again, that’s what they said about GSS 2020 but it still took place anyway.
Featured Image: G Y Mak / Shutterstock.com
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