Tuesday, October 31, 2006

The little red bug


This pretty little red bug features very prominently in my childhood memories.

One of our little joys as a kid was to catch insects, and the ladybird was one of the girls' favourites (while the boys liked to keep spiders for sparring purposes). On hindsight, now that I've grown old and wiser and more environment conscious, it's actually quite cruel to these tiny creatures.

Ladybird is also closely associated to my first library of English storybooks. At that time, we read about Cinderella, Jack and the beansprout and other fairy tales from the tiny, hardcover "Ladybird Classics".

These books also served as our toys, as we stacked them to become doll houses, or lined them up to become roads for our toy cars.

These are life's simple pleasures for simple kids with simple needs during those good, old and memorable days.

This is Singapore

What you see here is really Singapore.

Last Sunday, went on a trip down memory lane in Lim Chu Kang -- a place I spend my childhood. So it's not totally unfamiliar, as we drove around the place.

I turned into tour guide, pointing out to R: here's the widest road of Singapore in one of the remotest corner of Singapore; there's only few kinds of beings residing here: soldiers, farmers (or agropreneurs, as they call themselves nowadays) and "ghosts" (the largest cemeteries are found here too...remember one of my primary school classmates has to walk past the quiet cemetary roads to get home everyday); that's the site of my old school, here's (Thong Hoe) the Orchard Road of the kampong dwellers, where get our groceries, stationery, clothes, haircut etc done; there's the old market where we had our Sunday breakfast...


We also drove to the end of Lim Chu Kang Road, where we reach the sea and admire the floating village (I mean the kelongs) not far away.

After which we went farm hoping, from tropical fish farm (Singapore is one of the largest exporter of ornamental fish in the world), veggie farm, goat farm etc.


Did not manage to find the site of my old house during this trip. Will consider searching again next time, probably with the help of my sister or father.
 
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