The Many Crossroads in Life

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Geography is indeed an important subject, I'll always bear that in mind.

Someone ( a foreigner) asked me today, " Miss, what's Singapore's population size?"

And I replied, "Erm, Sir, it's about 3 or 4 million."

Right. As if I knew what the amount was. I crapped. hahaha. At that moment, a part of my memory seemed to come back to me. blahblah.....ok, imagine it's those kind of flashback you see in movies, like,

"the room swirled and I found myself sitting at a familiar seat, in a familiar room. It's my secondary school classroom! I had been in that room when I was in Secondary 2! Ah! I konw that person standing in front of the whiteboard; she had been my Geography teacher. Vertically challenged, she stood at around 1.5m. Her curly hair somewhat resembled mine.haha. Judging by the wrinkles she had then, she could easily have been in her mid-40s. I could still vividly smell the perfume she wore.

'You all had better know Singapore's Geography well. It's quite embarassing when an "ang moh" asks about Singapore's land or population size and you can't answer. Now I'll test you. What is Singapore's population size?'

My hand shot up in the air. '3 or 4 million, Miss Wong?', I replied cheekily."

And the lesson went on. I can't exactly remember what happened after that.

I just did some research, and Singapore has a population of about 4.4million people. Whew.. what a close shave! I was really astonished when I was asked that question though. It was exactly what our Geography teacher had warned us about 3 years ago.

Back to what happened today. Actually, I was glad that what our teacher had told us did really happen on me. Well, it's not big news, but I thought it was something worth writing about.

Give it a thought: if you were a asked the same question, how would you respond and how would you feel? It certainly felt different for me.