Sunday, June 21, 2009

Friends open us to new experiences


This post shall be dedicated to one of my dear friends who has helped me learn to blow 'balloons' from the plastic-like material found in the tube shown on the photo above.

When I was a child, I had bought a few of those tubes from one of the "mama-shops" in my neighbourhood. Fellow bloggers, Victor Koo, has written about "mama-shops". You can read his related posts here. In essence, an Indian Mama shop is a sundry shop or general provision stall traditionally operated by Indians, especially the Tamil ethnic group. Colloquially, such stalls are referred to as "Mama Shop or Stall", the word "Mama" means "uncle" in Tamil.

Back to the 'balloons'. As a child, my attempts to blow balloons were many times not successful. I simply could not blow any balloon. I often ended with squeezing out all the contents from the tube, yet without a single balloon blown successfully.

It was with delight and pleasure yesterday to learn how to blow 'balloons' from my friend. My friend taught me that I should ensure that the tip of the straw is properly covered with the contents from the tube. The next step was to blow. I found that initially I had to blow hard. Once the balloon has started to form, I could blow into the straw more gently.

Many thanks to my friend, I have finally learnt the art of blowing 'balloons' and acquired a new skill.

I am thankful to my friends. They open me to new experiences and perspectives of life which I may probably not be exposed to had I been left on my very own. It is with gratitude that I write this post.

3 comments:

eastcoastlife said...

I often buy these for my students to play. They enjoy such simple games.

oceanskies79 said...

Eastcoastlife: You have lucky students who can get to enjoy the fun from these simple games. :)

Lam Chun See said...

I liked the smell of the balloon.