When I was a skinny, pimply kid of 17, my mate Mark and I were pretty keen to go to the first year university students’ BBQ being staged by the students’ rep council. My older sister’s boyfriend at the time was a member and he assured us that there would be plenty of meat and beer and it would all be free. We young males, fresh from our draconian ruled all boys’ high school were also pretty keen to have a look at some girls who might be different from the poor things we’d ogled for years just because they had the misfortune to live in the same suburb and therefore catch the same bus home from school each day!
I spied this absolutely gorgeous girl talking to a guy I couldn’t stand, Harry, who had also attended the same school, but seemed to have an easy charm with the girls that we couldn’t match at all. I encouraged Mark to join me and emboldened by a couple of ales, we approached the two girls and managed to keep up quite a lively conversation for a number of hours, getting rid of Harry quite quickly and losing all track of time. I was amazed at myself but totally mesmerized by this girl…she seemed like a goddess to me: I’d never experienced such a moment. That was it pretty much for both of us we recall: it was then just about the logistics of making it all happen. That day was February 26, 1980 and it was 30 years ago!
We certainly didn’t have such a romantic dalliance this weekend, but we did have a lot of memories and amused ourselves with most of them. My bold statement to my grandmother that night, “I’ve just met the love of my life” seemed grossly overconfident of me, but very prophetic! The love of my life and I had a fairly usual weekend, but we did enjoy the weather today and went on a long walk, visiting some of our old haunts in the local vicinity that we haven’t been back to in years.
It was great to wander through the neighborhood, re-visiting parks and lanes and streets and alleys that we don’t normally travel these days. We noticed lots of changes along the way, but we highly entertained in the wet market alley in Shilin. All the excitement of Chinese New Year seemed to be over, but today must hold some special significance as burning incense fills the air, crackers are being jettisoned with increasing regularity and volume from our nearby river bridge and the omnipresent drums have been beating out their dark and mechanical rhythm through the day and evening.
The wet market’s food is always a sight, and not always a good one. The trays of colourful fish look fresh and cool lying in their ice beds, but the dripping fat of slaughtered pigs along with their misshapen heads on hooks is something we could do without! The charm of this market, however, is its coarseness: no one stands on ceremony here and if you don’t like it, you just don’t enter its murky depths! Not only is fresh meat and poultry and seafood for sale, but hawkers extol the virtues of the latest miracle oils, stallholders offer samples of cereals and honey and fried food while in between there are clothing outlets both budget and higher end, jewelry stores and hardware shops. You can pretty much get anything you want! Some temple boys provided great entertainment with their bobbing and weaving dance carrying their portable altar and the associated sounds were deafening and their entourage dirty, rough and many in number.
We eventually wandered home the long way round, crossing the bridge over the river with gardens and cycleways below and the whirring MRT in the distance. SOGO provided some takeaway sandwiches for our lunch and we settled in to watch some Twenty20 cricket in the second game between Australia and New Zealand. All in all, a great weekend, full of nostalgia and good times! Photos: market curiosities, a vista from the bridge and the curiously named “Pocari Sweat”! Cass is now reading "$20 a Gallon" and I'm reading "
The Cement Garden"
