Multi-Coloured Walls

I wasn’t very creative when I was young and my idea of making something pleasing to the eyes was to use whatever I had available.

When I had this assignment to colour in a picture of a wooden house made of planks, I coloured each and every plank a different colour, making use of all the colour pencils I had at my dispense in the kindergarten.

Teacher’s comment: “Lionel, your picture is very… colourful”

Leisure World Cruise

There was a promotion for a cruise while I was still schooling in University. It seemed like a good deal as it was only about $30 for a 2D1N cruise!

Esh, Bern, Em and I signed up for the cruise just for the heck of it. We had to take a ferry boat to the middle of nowhere before we disembarked on to a dock and transferred to the cruise ship.

The activities on the ship were minimal as it was targeted mainly at gamblers, but it was a cheap and good way to get away from the hustle and bustle of Singapore life and just eat and relax.

Half-naked inventory check

The first day of being Recruit Tan was “interesting”. First of all, I had to go to this strange place where I got kitted out with the latest and greatest in army wear, then I had to go on a depressing boat ride with my fellow recruits to an island (and to add to the misery, it had to rain. Did I mention there was no shelter on the boat?). Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse…

After getting off the boat and the subsequent short trip on a green army truck, we were ushered to a parade square illuminated by a number of spotlights. All of us had to organise ourselves in neat rows and place our new army equipment in front of us. Then we had to perform an inventory check…

Everytime our army instructors raised an item, we had to verify that we had the item and that it could fit. So you can imagine that when they raised the camouflaged shirt and trousers, all of us recruits had to take off our clothes and get familiar with one another’s undies. There were a few sniggers going around as various types of underwear were revealed: “holey” underwear, undies in funky colours, funny boxers, etc.