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“You never bring us out!”

Just like any other Thursday, I had a lesson scheduled in the late afternoon, and storytelling in the evening.
Since I had the morning and the early afternoon free, I decided to go out to take some pictures with my Nendo daughters since the inspiration well had dried up.

Apparently Kureha, Shana and Seraphy aren’t too happy with me bringing the usual Rin, Kagamin and Kyouka out all the time.

I intended to cycle around Yishun, the little town which I live in, and introduce the notable places to give everyone a glimpse on how a typical Singapore town looks like.

Lets start off when these buildings. They are high-rise apartment blocks called HDB flats. HDB is the acronym for Housing Development Board, and such scary name belongs a certain sub-group of the government, so these buildings actually belongs to the government. I would estimate that 60-70% of the residents in Singapore live in such buildings, the rest would be on private property housing.

The HDBs are built close together with carparks located in between the buildings. HDBs range from 10 levels of apartments to as high as 20 levels in some places. As for me, I live in a 12 storey HDB and live on the 10th floor.

My mum enjoys gardening and she grows a few unknown plants along the corridor. Lately, her flowers has been blooming and there has been butterflies (which unfortunately comes with catepillars) flying around.

My plant knowledge is as good as my command in the African language so correct me if I am wrong but this is a called a Morning Glory in our part of the woods.

For older HDBs the lift system only used to go to 2 levels, but recently the government has undertaken a massive upgrading project to provide the lift service to every single level. My mum always said that they should have done so when they started construction of the building instead of waiting almost a decade later when people grew old and had trouble scaling the stairs so they started complaining and demanding for the lift service.

It is interesting to note that ever since there was a lift service at every level, I noticed that people who lived 2 levels from the ground level were too lazy to walk down the stairs and instead insist on taking the lift. I guess convenience cultivates a certain level of laziness in people ^^

And of course, smoking and littering in the lifts are against the law here in Singapore, just like almost every other place owned by the government, and if you get caught, the law will slap you with a fine that will put a dent in your wallet indefinitely.

I decided to head down to Yishun Park first. Yishun park is just a stone’s throw away from my place and there are some interesting thing there that would make interesting photos. To get there, all I had to do was cycle down a bicycle path.

On the way there I passed by the hospital that is currently being built near my place. Called the Khoo Teck Hwat hospital, it is supposed to be finished in 2011 if my memory serves me right. They are actually building it pretty fast. I guess they are pressured to complete it within the given time frame. Hopefully the construction company doesn’t cut any corners just to accomplish the speed build.

Somehow I can never understand why kid posters are put up along the construction barriers for promotion. Maybe the guy in charge of the advertisement is a loli actually!

As I was cycling down, I noticed the sky rapidly changing colors. The thing about Singapore is that the weather is as unpredictable as a PMS-mode Shana. One moment it’s blazing hot the next moment it’s wet and cold.

Littered along the bicycle path are bushes which house tiny little red flowers like this. Ironically, these flowers are a common sight in my neighbourhood and I’ve been seeing them since I was in primary school and yet I still don’t know that they are called.

Moving along, I saw some hardworking foreign workers repainting the drain fence. You don’t see local Singaporeans doing such jobs so foreign workers are hired to do them. Unfortunately these workers are shunned by most Singaporeans who view them as ‘dirty’ and ‘uncultured’ despite their obvious contribution to the workforce. I used to think of them as scary black men when I was young too, but later on when I grew up and with the photography interest making me go around taking pictures, I realised that these foreign workers are the best people to take pictures off. They always smile and aren’t camera shy!

The hospital to be is pretty big and you still can see another block at the end of the road here at the road junction.

I reached the park in no time and proceeded to cycle around it’s perimeter, only stopping at a grassy knoll near one of the entrance. I climbed the knoll and saw had a nice view of the surroundings. The building you see in the above pictures is my primary school where I spent the first 6 years of my education.

I wanted to climb up a little higher but there were port holes everywhere preventing my advance up the knoll

On the knoll, there were dandelions spammed everywhere. In case you don’t know what dandelions are, there are these white little flowers where have their seeds losely attached to the main body of the plant. This particular dandelion which Kagamin has found was actually well equipped with seeds, but my heavy breathing from trying to position Kagamin close to it caused lots of the seeds to be scattered away.

Though I am sure that Kagamin actually blew more seeds away than I did.
Do dandelions exist in your part of the woods? I think they are pretty common flowers!

The next plant which Kagamin came across while scaling the knoll were ‘touch me nots’; also known as mimosa to some people. Just as their name states, upon contact, their leaves close up.

I am pretty sure I had a few more pictures of the leaves being closed, but it seems that it somehow escaped the batch upload.

I guess, for some people, everything looks like a blob of green, but if you actually look closer, every picture is different ^^

The next plant thing is something which I have no idea what it’s called. Kagamin thinks it is edible apparently.

The last pictures that I took up the knoll were pictures of spiderwebs which had water droplets stuck on them. If you come early in the morning, you can easily see the spiderwebs hidden amongst the grass as the morning dew condenses on it. Perhaps I should come here one morning to show the awesome view.

Taking the pictures up there was a pain as the grass was spikey and I couldn’t look down into my camera’s viewfinder easily.

Anyway, I was glad to leave the knoll. By this time, it was already showing signs of rain incoming.

I decided to cycle into the park instead of sticking to the perimeter. The paths in the park are mostly narrow ones surrounded by trees. Here you can see students cutting through the park to get home. It was after school time.

It started to pour really heavily before I knew it and I had to find shelter quickly.
Thankfully there are sheltered domes located at each of the corners of the park and I docked myself and my bike in one of them.

From my sheltered location, I could see some unlucky students who weren’t fast enough to find shelter and had to run in the rain.

The rain started to show no mercy.

I really cannot think of a better caption for these pictures other than reusing:
“When will the rain stop?”

It was extremely tough to take these picture due to the fact that there were other humans with me in the shelter whom I dared not make eye contact once I took out Rin and Kagamin, though I could see they were watching my every move posing the girls for the camera. And secondly the rain was really VERY STRONG AND HEAVY; which meant that water droplets kept fogging up my lens and it was really hard to get clean shots.

These pictures of Rin and Kagamin are the best out of the few dozen I took. The real nice thing are the water droplets dripping down their hair and faces. I really love it! (Yes, the wind was so strong that rain was blowing into the shelter too ^^)

After probably around 40 minutes, the rain finally took a break. I had already cancelled my lessons as I was all wet and had intended to go for lesson right after the photoshoot but I couldn’t now since I was all wet and it was already quite late.

Seeing that the rain had simmered down a little, I decided to cycle home. But the rain decided to continue it’s downpour on my way home and I had to cycle at full speed back in the rain. By the time I got home, Every part of me was wet. Thankfully my bag is somewhat water proof so my Nendo carriers and notebook was spared from the onslaught.

Back at home…

Kureha noticed my wet glasses left on the table and started to clean it.

When I proceeded to thank her for it, she turned her head away with a “Hmpt”. Apparently still angry with me not bringing her out ^^

After finishing wiping it, she passed it back to me without saying anything.

She proceeded to wipe Rin’s wet hair after that.
Kureha: Stay still!
Rin: Kureha onee-san’s hands are so warm and nice !~

Kureha: Talk some more and I’ll apply more pressure to that little head of yours.
Rin: Ouch Ouch ~hehe!

In the other room….

Kagamin: Urghhhhhh
Shana: Hush hush…

Kagamin: Thank you Shana onee-san…
Shana: I told you to keep quiet already. Do you need me to tape your mouth?

AHhhhhhh CHoooooo!!!!* Blows Nose*

Kureha: Another one who needs her hair dried…

Rin: I love my sisters!

END

This post is remarkably longer than usual and it headed towards an unexpected direction due to the rain but I am glad that it actually rained. If it didn’t I wouldn’t have been able to create the scenes of sisterly love ^^

Such a long post! Hope you have fun after reading it and it brightened up your day, because it was terribly wet and exhausted in the end after the cycling, getting drenched and storytelling XD