SINGAPORE SHORT STORIES

I have been to nearly all the museums in Singapore, hence it came as a surprise to me when I discovered that there was actually a Singapore Coffee Musuem behind the Old Nanyang Coffee cafe at Smith Road I was in.

I was one of the people in the world who kept a diary long before the advent of the internet and web 2.0 technologies. By a diary, I mean a notebook or a real diary notepad, where I penned down my thoughts, my life on every day of the year. I kept diaries since I was young, as early as 10 years of age; however there were breaks in between when I could not keep up the routine, discipline, rigour and commitment of keeping a diary. My dozens of notes (which I fastened together as diaries) helped make me sane during National Service. However, with time, all these diaries or ‘makeshift’ diaries have long gone with the wind as I decided not to immerse myself in the past but to move forward and make the most of future! With the advent of blogs, I find the passion of writing diaries online being rekindled. There started my first foray of online diaries in the form of blogs during my university days. At that times, blogs were used as online diaries and I kept blogging my thoughts on this ...

Sirens rang islandwide at 12 pm sharp yesterday while many Singaporeans were still busy visiting their relatives and friends. I believe many Singaporeans do not understand the significance of the siren. Worst, they might not have heard the shrill of the siren while enjoying the festive mood and food of Chinese New Year. Similar to other years, yesterday 15 Feb is Total Defence Day. 58 years ago, Singapore was invaded by the Japanese and was occupied for a total of 3 years and 8 months. Under the Japanese rule, Singaporeans led a life of hell. Thousands of men were massacred, thousands of women were raped with many being shot in their vaginas after being raped, children were not spared as the Japanese soldiers flung infants high up towards the skies, only to have them dropped to the heart of their bayonets, with their blood smeared across the faces of their Japanese devils. I have heard somewhere that these Japanese soldiers believed the blood of infants smeared across their faces was a...

Dear readers, how have your Christmas eve and Christmas day been? It must be good right? Same here for me as I have been to a few very exciting and interesting places of interests for Singapore tropical Christmas which I will definitely share with you in the coming few posts, so do watch out for it! This morning, Christmas Day, my parents, wife and I went to see not Santa Claus on this Christmas Day, but Mummy! Yup, the mummies you watched in those “Mummies” shows starring Brandon Fraser which come to life and which will come and grab you! Mummy maniac has hit Singapore with the exhibition: “Quest for Immortality: The world of Ancient Egypt” held at the Singapore National Museum from 22 December 2009 to 4 Apr 2010. Ticket for this exhibition costs $15, but come every public holiday, admission charges to the 5 Singapore Museums: National museum, Asian Civilization museum, Philatelic museum, Arts museum and Peranakan museum are waived free. Hence, the “Mummy” exhibitions are open to the ...

I carried out a mini spring cleaning in the afternoon, clearing loads of documents which are now rendered of no use to me. Most of these items merit not much of an attention. M any of them played a vital role in my life, work and studies once, but they are of no use in my life now. I could have kept them for memory purpose, but imagine if I were to keep each and every old document, I would have turned my room into a museum. I just keep the more important ones which are more memorable. One item which caught my attention was this packet of transparency sheets: I had bought this packet of transparency sheets many many years ago (so long that I could not remember)! The fact that this packet of transparency sheets resided for long untouched attests to the inevitable fact that transparency sheets like these are already obsolete! These days, everyone giving a presentation uses a Microsoft Power Point presentation, gone are the days when one inks his or her presentation using those foul-smelli...

Sited in a modest corner off Armenian Street is Singapore's Peranakan Musuem, a musuem where you can find all thing Peranakan. There has been a strong revival of the Peranakan culture in Singapore following the dazzling success of Mediacorp's local drama "The Little Nonya" starring Jeanette Aw and Qi Yu Wu who play the protagonists in the show. I know little about the Peranakan culture thus it was an eye opener to me as my Dear and I partook in the history of the Peranakan on 27 Jan 09, the second day of the Chinese Lunar New Year. Being a public holiday that day, the musuem was open free to all. I learnt that there were actually many different Peranakan, for example, Hokkien Peranakans, Teochew Peranakans, etc.. thus people I see everyday on the streets may be Peranakans though they look much like Chinese, it is hard to detect the subtle differences at one glance unless we know the Perankans personally. My Dear and I left the musuem with a better appreciation of Pe...

The Rubix’s Cube was a decades-old toy. It was a toy I encountered and played with since young; but nevertheless a toy I could never master till now! I always find it amazing how some young kids could easily twist, turn and flip the cube till they got the 6 uniformly coloured faces ‘correct’ .. and all within minutes. The ease with which they carried out the ‘feat’ put me to shame as I have played with Rubix’s cube no lesser than 50 times in my life but have never for once mastered the feat (or trick?). Is there a trick behind the Rubix’s Cube? Or is the game a ‘mind’ game, a game which test how flexible or inflexible your mind is? Or are the skills to solving the Rubix Cube already hard-wired in us: either you have it or you don’t? The internet is abound with the secrets to decoding the Rubix’s Cube, with pictures and videos depicting each and every step to ‘getting it right’. Prior to this source, books on cracking the Rubix’s cube were aplenty. But I have never ‘consult’ these ‘secr...

The sights and cacophony of colorful street artists plying their trade greet me the moment I step onto the bustling street. The aroma of delectable hawker fare immediately follows, wafting across the street, melding with the pungent incense and the roasted fragrance of chestnut to form a uniquely characteristic scent. This is Waterloo Street, a street pulsating with the rhythm of life, a street where I feel like home. My parents introduced me to Waterloo street in Bugis when I was just six years of age to pay homage to the Chinese deities residing in the Kwan Imm Temple and pray for peace. Thereafter, I have made a myriad revisits to the temple as a student yearning for good results, as an executive wishing for career advancement and always as a Buddhist praying for peace and prosperity. Since the preliminary visits to the temple, Bugis, resonating with its buzzing scores of interesting fixtures and activities has beckoned me on. I have developed an affinity for Bugis, grown accustomed...

I saw this cute Mario toy in a display at a shopping centre here. Mario is a very famous character in Nintendo's game. Before Sony's playstation and X-box, we have the Nintendo games and some other games like Sega... some twenty years ago. Though most know Mario by face, most will not really know more about him. According to Wiki, Mario is depicted as a short, pudgy, Italian-Americanplumber who lives in the Mushroom Kingdom, having originated from New York. He is best known for repeatedly stopping the plans of Bowser to kidnap Princess Peach and subjugate the Mushroom Kingdom. He also has other enemies and rivals, including Donkey Kong and Wario. Mario is actually the James Bond in computer games, killing villains and rescuing others.

I saw this collection of erasers at a store recently and memories of the yester-years came flooding to my mind. When I was in primary school, I and my friends would just call erasers as 'rubber'. But fast forward to this century, 'rubber' has become rather a sensitive word. It was a craze back then in my primary school days when my classmates and I would just spent our 'hard-earned' pocket money to buy such rubbers, with a picture of a country depicted on the top face of each 'rubber'. The cost of one such eraser was 10 cents per piece and the challenge of all collectors is to collect all the 48 erasers! Anyway, would it be far easier to just purchase one whole box of such erasers, containing all the 48 erasers than collecting them individually? However, the school stationery shop sold these erasers separately and the possession of one freshly-minted box of erasers is only for the richer kids! My classmates and I were always scrambling to purchase t...

The current refurbishment of the Louvre’s Classical Greek and Hellenistic galleries affords an unexpected and unique opportunity to present a selection of Greek masterpieces at the National Museum of Singapore. Despites Louvre’s huge collection of over 45,000 Greek and Roman artefacts, it seldom loans more than a dozen items at a time from the department. The present exhibition is not only exceptional in this respect- with 130 works of Greek Arts on loan here- it is also the first time that many of the objects have left the Louvre since arriving there. Normally separated according to material, a division imposed by architectural constraints at the Louvre (stone sculptures are exhibited on the ground floor, while vases, bronzes and terracotta figurines are displayed on the first floor, where the floorboards can only support the weight of small objects), this exhibition is therefore a rare chance to view objects of different materials displayed thematically. Carefully selected, the artef...