Hi, > Grew up there, so I guess I've got some license. I'm now in Brisbane, > Australia, but Singapore's so tiny I may have memorised it :-)
Har! yet another of the places I lived in when I was a kid. We were posted to Changi for a couple of years, and lived in a house in Siglap (Beaumont Rd or Gardens, I can still remember). It was the early 1960s. Lee Kwan Yew was quite new as the PM, or became PM while we were there. There was rioting in the streets, and 'She Loves You' was the new Beatles record. I think Singapore has probably changed a bit since then. We wouldn't go to the beaches because they were covered in dead dogs and gulls - we went to Changi swimming pool every afternoon instead. The street we lived on didn't have a made-up road, just a dirt track. My mother used to buy live chickens from a cart and the chicken man would cut their heads off and let them run around the garden for a bit. Then he would cut the feet off and give them to us boys to play with. We had a very nice ama called Ann. Once she took us to her home in a place called Kampong and I was horrified by the poverty and the squalor she lived in. I don't know if it was truly like that, or just my childish perception. A place I particularly remember which could still be there is the Tiger Balm Gardens, with a horrific display of people suffering torments in Hell. There were also a lot of interesting Hindu funerals, and festival parades where people ran metal spikes through their bodies. -- Cheers, Bob
