www.Go To The Mountain - Musings of a Potential Guru

After being alive for a long time you will find that life really is still too short. The elixir of youth is still elusive. Some eat to live and others live to eat. After eating for a long time you can get tired and one can walk around a food centre not knowing what to eat. This is eating fatigue made worse by the reduction of good hawker food as even the food scene in Singapore now has been commercialised. You own a food stall, decide what to sell, employ a couple of foreign workers and you just come back to collect your earnings. Almost everywhere you go to, the stalls look the same. Perhaps even the food tastes the same. Yet it is the hawker food that drives the economy and the irony is that some or quite many of these are bad for our health when they are too oily or salty, etc. But make no mistake, Singapore is food heaven. Hong Kong may boast better quality but if variety is the spice of life then Singapore has few peers. For me, it is getting harder to find good food stall...

I used to know many friends from childhood who grew up from the same vicinity. They were living in Kim Keat, Jalan Bahagia, Jalan Tenteram and later Toa Payoh. Oh yes, we mustn't forget Whampoa. Kim Keat Kim Keat used to have a primary school and behind it a vocational institute, a precursor to our current ITE. Primary school students are not allowed to go to the vocational school but I broke the rule once when I heard they had a canteen (known previously as tuck shop) stall that served the best mee rebus. It was true! The old houses just outside the school are low lying types, unpretentious and promoted good neighbourliness due to the way it was built. There was a pushcart stall peddling coconut and pineapple drinks just outside the school's main gate, you know the kind of pineapple where they let you dip in dark soy sauce with red cut chili in them and was every one's favourite?  Just next to the school was a government clinic which nobody liked as we went th...

Venezuela, Dominica, Lebanon, New Caledonia and Guatemala visited my blog to cross the century mark, with Guatemala being the 104 country to have done so. Maybe I should do it like Changi Airport and sponsor some Venezuela Miss World to Singapore since they were the 100th country to have done so. I used to save money to buy an Apple Song Book for 101 songs as a teenager. Today an iPod is usually given to the youngsters and it could carry thousands of songs in it. The irony of life is often, as we progress, we actually regress. If you drop your cell phone into the sh*t hole while texting or tweeting your friends "shitting in office now" you won't even remember any number of your friends. When people ask for for phone number, I tell them "sorry, I won't know as I do not call myself". I have said it before, lots of good hawker food will all disappear in the next 5-10 years. It is not just gut feeling but I have actually spoken to real hawkers. The belo...