It’s not a question that keeps you up at night, but when you think about it, there really aren’t any petrol stations in Singapore’s Central Business District. Why is that so? Peter has a short history of the situation, and how petrol stations were slowly moved out of the CBD starting in the 1970s.

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I think it’s safe to say that we all take calculators for granted. In everyday situations, it’s easy to call up the calculator from the computer or use the one built into your mobile phone. But what was it like to be a schoolkid before handheld calculators? How did students work out complex equations (such as those involving logarithms) before then? Jerome shows us the answer: A Log Book.

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Remember the Tiger beer jingle from some years back? “What time is it? It’s Tiger Time!” Chun See has a Tiger-time related question on his blog. When was this Tiger beer truck photo taken?

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We think of convenience stores today as small air-conditioned mini-markets, sometimes open all day and all night, filled with everyday items that are often slightly more expensive than what you would find in a regular market. But go back yesterday, and read how convenience stores – real convenience – was often a hole in the wall.

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The exhibition, Quest for Immortality, at the National Museum of Singapore is ending in less than a month’s time. Have you visited it yet?

Photo by Sparklette

We went on a tour of ancient Egypt at the museum and came up close and personal with rare artifacts, treasured relics, and yes, actual mummies.

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Meet Arthur Poskitt. This is his picture. He is nearing his eighties, and between January 1948 and June 1949 he served in Singapore as a Signalman with the Royal Corps of Signals. He shares about his time in Singapore with Chun See of Good Morning Yesterday.

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When I was in school, there was a popular range of joke shop tricks that you could buy off the stores and play pranks on your classmates – a popular prank was a trick pack of chewing gum (chewing gum was still allowed then) that had a small mousetrap in place of a stick of gum. Offer it to a friend, and instead of a stick of gum, they would get a sharp sting on the thumb! Of course, tricks like these were quite costly for a primary schoolboy’s budget, so I was quite tickled to see what kind of pranks kampong boys came up to – without spending a cent!

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Does anyone remember a time when snake charmers played their tunes in Singapore? I have only seen snake charmers in the movies, playing some sort of flute and with a hypnotic tune command snakes to pop out of their basket and dance a little dance. Derek writes about the snake charmers who used to play in front of Raffles Hotel.

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While urban societies (Singapore included) are lamenting the slowdown in population growth and replacement rate, Jerome shows us one population in Singapore that has been steadily increasing: the population of cars on our roads. How much? At the time of independence, we had about 160,000 car on our roads. 45 years later, we have nearly a million!

This leap in vehicle population has led to the need to better control the flow of traffic, through better road networks and restriction of entry into areas by taxation. Jerome writes:

So, how did we get to where we are today? When the first motor car arrived in 1896, things were slow and easy. Rickshaws would have been the means by which most got about and distances travelled would probably have been small. It took perhaps a quarter of a century or so before the motor vehicle population started taking off: from a population of 535 cars in 1913, the number of cars tripled five years later. By the time I was being rocked to sleep in the back of my father’s Austin 1100 in the mid 1960s, the population of the island had grown tremendously and the number of vehicles on the roads had increased by some one hundred times. It was thought that the vehicle population would hit one million by 1990 based on a Ministry of National Development (MND) forecast, and with the limited land resources available, and the need to redistribute population centres as well as industries to the outer reaches, plans were put forward in the early 1970s to improve the road system and for the construction of a mass transit system. The plans for the improvement in the road system were the catalyst for the expressway network that we see today.

Jerome’s post, From driving around beautiful circles to driving under monstrous gantries, takes us through the history of Singapore’s traffic management systems, which is riddled with familiar and also outdated acronyms: ALS, RZ, ERP, CBD, RPS, VQS, COE, IU… do you know what they all stand for?

Younger Singaporeans will probably have no recollection of a time when the wet market was a roadside affair, and when streetside vendors sold not only food but all kinds of goods like furniture, household appliances and toys. Derek Tait writes about when you would go to streetside vendors for your daily marketing and how they moved into permanent marketplaces.

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