Thursday, December 21, 2006

Picnic

Christmas shopping is too energy sapping. It's worse when it's raining because the walkways are crowded and people still smoke in the crowded wet walkways. Everyday this week has been a Christmas shopping day. We're almost done and I'm sick of town. So sick of it that I decided to brave Vivocity instead today and truth be told, it wasn't all that bad thanks to its cavernous nature. Even then, we were there for about 3 hours and I'm all shopped out for the day.

The highlight of this shopping week however, was going to Scotts Picnic for lunch. It's closing at the end of this year for good so we figured we should go say our farewells. Packrat and I don't generally crave anything from there since it serves the same type of food that most other food courts do. Its distinction is that it's the first shopping centre food court to have ever been open in Singapore 19 years ago.

Looking around it yesterday, I realised that the only stall I remember from its inception was the Beef noodles stall. It was a franchise (and I think franchises were not a big thing back then either) of the Odeon Beef noodles although truth be told, I'm not sure whether it's still Odeon beef noodles since that seems to have faded into oblivion and Hock Lam seems to be the Odeon of the 21st century.

I made the comment to Packrat that Picnic was no different from any other food court now so why were we honouring it in its last hours. His response was one word- Nostalgia. And that's true. We grew up in the time when it was a big deal to eat at Scotts. I specifically remember going there on dates! Of course, dates as a teenager then meant fast food or something equivalent to that and Picnic was the cool equivalent. And the Picnic then, was always crowded, probably where I honed my skill of stalking tables. It was also there, that I discovered Yami Yogurt and the hapless boyfriend of that time would traipse down to Scotts just to appease me with a take home tub of icy goodness- yes, the brattiness, princess-ness was a skill that I was already quite adept in using at that time. :) So many good memories... and oh, yet another one! Queuing up at a public phone there to ring home and tell my parents my O level results. Celebrating with friends had taken precedence over telling the parents so it was only at Scotts that I did that, together with a bunch of ACS, SJI, SCGS, RGS kids whose minds it also slipped.

Sadly, today, it looks less bright and much less crowded, good for a wary shopper like me but it looks its age and it looks a little run down, as if knowing that its time is nearly up. It's also probably not helped by the fact that many of the stores are already closed in preparation for the big shut down at the end of the year.

So, my end-of-year resolution is to go back to Picnic a few more times in the next 10 days and soak up all its nostalgic goodness and also to wonder if this generation of kiddies would have as many nostalgic places to reminisce over.

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Ondine tossed this thought in at 19:11

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