You May Not Believe This, But I Was Once a Kid Too.

...what seemed like a million years ago, believe it or not, I was kid in kindergarten in Krokop, Miri. I went to kindergarten for the usual pre-school activities, learning new words, how to write, how to read, etc.

But now that I think about it, many things that seemed so normal back then would certainly have been outrageous by today's standards.

Take for example, our beverages at recess breaks. Every recess at about 10am, we would watch as some men enter the kindergarten load up huge aluminium containers in front of our class outside and our teachers would give us colorful plastic mugs and ask us to line up in front of the containers to get our beverages. But we weren't given ordinary beverages, no sirreee. While one of the containers contain the usual timeless children's classic beverage - Milo, the other contains - get this - coffee.

And I always went for the coffee. Never been a fan of Milo. But I guess you could tell by now.

So, by noon we were literally bouncing off the walls. And as far as I could recall our teachers can't figure out why we were so doggone active.

And then there was the kindergarten toilet. It is quite basically just a raised, enclosed wooden platform with a hole through the floor over the Miri river.

If that weren't dangerous enough (or sanitary for that matter), even heading to the toilet was an adventure in itself, as we would have to navigate across a wooden plank bridge connecting the toilet to terra firma, and this part was about 15-20 child's pace. So not only that we were in danger of falling through the hole into the river, we were also in danger of falling over what was barely a wooden bridge into the river bank.

Since they also serve coffee there, and coffee induces urination, I bet our kindergarten made substantial contributions to all the muck downriver too.

So Health, Safety & Environment wasn't big then. But somehow we survived.

After school or during the recess we would all clamor at the canteen located just in front of the kindergarten for sweets and what we call 'ice creams' - these are just ice popsicles in plastic tubes. I know I only had 20 cents allowance daily. That's the equivalent of two ice popsicle sticks then, or I think what amounts to about RM500 in today's dwindling currency. A rich kid or two would show off the huge 50 cent coin to us before he would accidentally drop it through the toilet or buy some candy without knowing about having to get his or her change back. The ultra rich one has paper currency RM1 notes, which was used for folding paper planes and various other origami or the paper ring because paper is fun. But that is rare.

Then there are the games we played while waiting for our rides. What my best friend of that time & I would do for fun, is get a huge band-aid-type self-sticking plaster from home, bring it to school, and stick it on our wrists, like a watch. Then we would talk to it pretending we're Michael Knight on the TV show Knight Rider and run in circles as fast as possible while also pretending we're the car from Knight Rider until we either pass out from the exhaustion (remember the coffee?) or our rides came, whichever came first.

Kids today would've just sat in the corner, playing a REAL Knight Rider on their Game Boy Advanced. Or play the same game on their cellular phone - or too busy calling up their parents to tell them to hurry up to pick them up.

We can't even figure out how to use a dial on a phone back then. Of course, in our defense, it was a rotary dial.

Nobody could figure that out.