It’s smack in the monsoon season again. There’s been heavy downpours every day, and the weather man has even projected that Singapore is going to be facing continued and sustained rainy days until the end of January.
As pleasant and a welcomed change to the really hot and humid months of July to September earlier this year have been, not everyone’s thrilled with the rain though. The news channels here have reported flooding along the Bukit Timah Road stretch with pedestrians and students having to wade through waist-high water to get to their destinations.
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I had one such experience of wading through waist-high water at the same stretch before in fact. That was back in 1985 when I was a secondary 2 student at ACS trying to get to Swiss Cottage Secondary School for some lessons I was taking in metal and wood crafting. That was about a kilometre walk that normally took me 12 minutes, but on that rainy morning took 90 minutes.
When I got to my lessons, I expected to be the latest student to arrive for lessons and to see my whole class of 40 others already there. I saw instead my teacher and just 3 other students – each equally as drenched as I was, bare foot with their socks and shoes hung to dry! I remembered my teacher taking a look at me and after having a good laugh, said the next time it rains like this and there’s massive flooding, it’s OK to skip lessons just for the day.:)
In retrospect, it probably really wasn’t very safe for a 13 year old boy to have tried wading along a flooded canal just to reach lessons. I think at that young age and maybe even unlike today’s school going kids, the thought of being late for lessons for any reason should had been scary. But now that I recollect, even at that age I was more intrigued and excited about the whole experience of wading through a flood, and I remember also that I was driven by determination to reach my destination, no matter the cost.
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It’s pretty fortunate that given the location of my work place, I don’t have to worry too much about downpours. I’ve never seen the roads I travel on from work to our Rivervale home flooded, and traffic was just a mite bit slower than normal yesterday but I still got home timely to enjoy a dinner that Lentor parents have brought over that afternoon during a visit to Hannah.
Oh yeah: this quick picture is taken at my new office at level 7 of my faculty’s block (blogged about the shift the other day here). It’s probably a little hard to tell, but it was raining heavily when the picture was taken.:)
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