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Let’s talk for serious here: How many times have you trotted through the CBD after sundown when it’s always all dazzled up for a night on the town, and thought to yourself, “Singapore, you fine. You babycakes fine and you all mine.”

I was breezing over the Esplanade Bridge on my bike, on pace to getting home in time for dinner with my parents, and observing Circuit Breaker things like, “Man, empty Merlion Park.” It wasn’t my first time seeing one of Singapore’s most popular attractions, typically crowded from pre-dawn to way past midnight, completely drained of jostling tourists strained with insistent locals running and cycling and skateboarding their ways through. But some Circuit Breaker things, you’ll never get used to.

Marina Bay this evening was as breathtaking as ever, moonbeams descending upon where the newest lap of the city waterfront hugs the Singapore River, the river gazing back up, reflecting starshine. “S G ❤” splayed across the Sands hotel’s three towering columns was the showstopper that snapped my head to the right for an OMGape as I arc’d over the bridge. It made me brake at the bottom, break my journey, and swerve over to the bay side to properly let the MBS light sparkle in my eyes. (All of the above would have been lethal at the same time, 7.15pm, on any regular evening with vehicles surging homewards out of downtown.) I knew my parents would understand if they had to wait a few more minutes to eat. Such spectacles are why you show up fashionably late for dinner.

The Marina Bay Sands light show that burst on every evening was on hiatus, for now barreled down to the same basements where our cocktail socials, pub quizzes, lazy brunches and cinematic nerdfests lie dormant. Those jet-setting fountain sprays, futuristic laser beams and fantastical visual projections would do their 15-minute acrobatics, then shut down at 8.15pm. This new light display is more muted, makeshift, modest. But it is the show that’s gone on, that doesn’t get turned off, that makes Marina Bay Sands less an ostentatious buffet of nouveau riches and more Singaporean than it’s ever been. It’s the new beacon of Marina Bay watch.