Peek into the heartlands

A solitary trip to Sheng Siong generated some interesting insights.

The first was in the form of a frowning mother nagging at her son; a chubby primary school kid nonchalantly bumbling around the super market picking and dropping random items, looking everywhere but at his mother.

I walked past them several times as I was grocery shopping and I swear that not once were her brows unfurrowed. She was mumbling stuff like "I told you to at least maintain the SA2 standard, but even that you cannot do.", "It's not your fault, it's my fault, I shouldn't have let you play your playstation." I assumed the chubby kid just got his results or some shit. No idea what's SA2 either. The contrast of the worried mum and the nonchalant bumbling chubby kid was pretty hilarious though.

And then I went to the kopitiam to buy char kway teow. As I sat waiting, my gaze alternated between seeing the uncle enthusiastically cook with an utter regard for hygiene, a red-faced old man drinking singha beer in front of the stall, and another old man in a printed floral shirt and 60s gold-rimmed glasses drinking tiger in front of the drinks stall.

First, the char kway teow uncle. He was touching and handling everything in his un-gloved hands, adding a dash of garlic here, a dash of soy sauce there, grabbing the noodles, throwing most in and the rest back into the bag, raining bean sprouts down the wok, and the best bit, adding the hum in.

Apparently, hum blood adds to the taste of char kway teow as I saw him pour a generous quantity down into the wok from a container he keeps uncapped and unrefrigerated on a shelf above the stove. Midway through cooking and realising he was running low on hum , he opened the fridge, took out a sealed bag of pre-shelled hums and poured the entire contents into the container sitting on the shelf. Now, I know, I thought the same thing - when will he ever use up the hums from the bottom of the container!? Maybe he scoops from the bottom, I don't know. Anyway I'm writing this an hour after I had the char kway teow and I must say it was delicious :D

Now on to the two sad looking old men drinking beer alone. I was thinking that they should just drink together and at least have each other for company. And the tiger beer drinking uncle at least, was doing some hardcore drinking. I saw him finish a bottle and frantically wave to the drinks stall aunty, indicating when he got her attention that he wanted one more bottle. He then shifted to the seat next to the one he was sitting on, as if that somehow makes things a little better. Sad.

I've a .net project due in slightly over a week. Sadder.

A friend said this to me today: "True Love? It'll bite you in the ass in a year." What makes it funny is that he had just ended a year-long relationship.

Oh, and in other news, I got into the nus muay thai team so I'll be training hard in December and finally do some running. Or a lot of running.
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