The gypsy diaries: I left my heart in Temasek Polytechnic.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

I left my heart in Temasek Polytechnic.

I left my heart in Temasek Polytechnic.
feeling: reminiscent

It was a gloomy day, one where the rain showed no intention of stopping, and you had to watch every step you took with your flipflops carefully lest you end up with rain-soaked bottoms. Bus 69 plowed through the familiar landscape and we scurried off the bus.

We had arrived. At the bus-stop where 518 took a million years to arrive, where the HTMIG held our midnight meetings when we were chased out of school compounds, where there was always the familiar joke of "You taking bus 23? Add both la," whenever bus 8 and 15 arrived concurrently.

We headed up the grey steps. Steps we've walked up and down at least a thousand times in our three years. In true TP tradition, we'd arranged to meet at our favourite "mushroom".

We mused about how our Hospitality & Tourism board looked way better when we were in charge of it, then rode up the cargo lift to the fifth floor. Down we walked through the familiar hallways. How many times have we sat around chatting while waiting for class to start? How many times have lecturers paused their lessons to come out to shush us? And into the staff office we went.

The familiar faces, some of which we used to view with trepidation (at least I did when my CPM group had to see Mr. Lee for a lit-review tutoring session, haha). Ms. Grace Chia, Mr. Nair, Mr. Aloysius Lee, Ms. Quah, Ms. Ivy Tan were there, amongst many new faces. The rest were at the Sentosa campus. And we chatted, and chatted, till our shoulders ached from the weight of our bags, and our stomachs growled from the lack of lunch.

So down we went, past the computer labs where we spent many a late night slogging through our projects, past the tennis courts where we polished our rusty skills... towards Mensa 2 for the damn shiok Western food.