Swaggerpuff's Adventure to the Lalang Field

Just a few days ago, on 26 February, I went on a short adventure with my two good friends from Poly, Hannah and Jonathan. We started it off by visiting Jonathan at his chalet looking place all the way at Loyang and ended it off with a belated birthday surprise for Hannah. 

When I say chalet looking, I really mean the East Coast Park kind of chalet. Every inch of it just looked like a chalet. We had popiahs at his place and chilled for about two hours before we left. And it was around this time where we started planning for the surprise (a little impromptu, I know). Jonathan brought us to this mini mart located in the middle of the chalet looking apartments and I was in charge of buying the birthday card without letting Hannah know. The mini mart auntie was kind enough to offer me a permanent marker to write the message on the card, but I didn't have the time for it, so I just bought the card and stuffed it into my bag. Jonathan, on the other hand, distracted Hannah by acting all fascinated with the mini mart and bought a root beer (which he kind of did an advertisement with). 

"Root beer, it just doesn't taste as nice when it's not glass bottled"

It really looks like an old school advertisement. 

Hannah inserted a 50 cents coin for Jonathan to ride that horsey and it ended up killing his butt for a good two minutes because of the bump at the back. So, after all that nonsense, we departed for Hannah's place at Hougang. Her mum made us mushroom soup and gave us bread to eat with. Jonathan brought chips from his place (which we couldn't finish) and surprisingly, it tasted really good when dipped into the mushroom soup. You guys should totally try it.

We then left for the Lalang field, which is somewhere at Tebing Lane (nearest LRT: Riviera), and along Punggol Waterway. Although Punggol Waterway is just opposite Hannah's place, we made the smart decision to take the MRT/LRT to Riviera, or we would have to walk for 5 kilometers. But that didn't make things any better. We were using all three of our phones with Google Maps to try and search for the exact location but to no avail. Even the directory had no information about this Lalang field. Therefore, we did the most logical thing - walk in the direction where the gigantic bridge is at. And after an hour of endless walking and attempts to take selfies of ourselves walking, we arrived at the famous Lalang field.

The gigantic bridge

The lalang field

It was... disappointing. I was expecting tall lalangs and lots and lots of it, only to be greeted with a sparse amount of lalangs that were only half our height. We followed the man-made pathway made by dozens who had came before us and were pricked by all the grass. Jonathan and I made the smart decision to wear jeans so we weren't pricked at our legs. Just kidding, we wore jeans because we were visiting Hannah's place and her mum. But it was still fortunate for us. Hannah, on the other hand had to suffer a lot because of the short romper she was wearing. But even with all the bad points of the lalang field, we still took some photos.

We left the lalang field to go to the bridge because we kept getting pricked left and right, and because the bridge looked much cooler. Jonathan went really near the river/reservoir/dam/lake/ocean (ah whatever) and we freaked out because we thought he was going to fall in. We spent quite a lot of time on the bridge taking photos and selfies. Apparently, this place is a cyclist spot. Every few minutes, we would have to stick to the side because there were cyclists coming through and we didn't want to get run over. Jonathan freaked us out for a second time when he put his phone on the selfie stick and lowered it beside the bridge to get a shot of a spiderweb. My legs literally turned to jelly at that foolish moment of his that I dropped to the floor.

Here's me jumping on the bridge

When we finally crossed the bridge, Hannah suggested we do a vlog and Jonathan volunteered to use his phone. So we placed his phone on Hannah's selfie stick and started vlogging as we crossed the bridge and back into the lalang field. Hannah's love for vlogging was showed as she was clearly enjoying herself as she talked to the phone screen, while everyone judged us as we walked by. After 20 minutes of vlogging (mostly by Hannah), we sat down at a bench to wait for the sunset and to check the video. To our amusement, there was no audio at all because we plugged the audio jack of the selfie stick into Jonathan's phone. It was really hilarious.

We learned from our mistake and unplugged the audio jack before vlogging again, because this will all become good memories 10 or 100 years down the road. We managed to catch the sunset, but we could hardly see anything. There were a bunch of buildings in our way which prevented us from seeing much. But we got another 20 minutes worth of video footage before Jonathan's phone ran out of battery. (Watch the video here!)

You're most probably wondering now, what about our impromptu and belated birthday surprise for Hannah? Well, while we were taking the train back from Punggol at around 7.30 PM, Jonathan and I were texting each other even though we were sitting beside each other. We came up with a flawless plan: I would alight with them at Hougang on the pretext that I was accompanying Jonathan for dinner and one of us would go and buy the cake. Hannah went with us to Hougang Mall because she wanted to get a drink, so I got Jonathan to go buy the cake as he got his "dinner" while I accompanied Hannah until he came back. Flawless.

It was flawless until Jonathan came back. Hannah knew immediately that he bought a cake because of the box it came in and Jonathan tried to convince her that it was just a bun. It didn't work, obviously. So we just sang her a happy birthday song in front of Starbucks (really loudly) while Hannah tried to shush us. We ended it off by writing the card in front of her (since we had no time to do so), gave it to her and did an introduction video for our vlog.

The mango cake we bought her (Photo credits: Hannah)

And the card we got her (Photo credits: Hannah)

Well, that sort of sums up our Swaggerpuff adventure. Till our next adventure.

The End.

The Place Where I Live

Tanjong Pagar, nicknamed Little Korea, is a small neighbourhood located around the central/southern area of Singapore. It is made up of both high rise office buildings and HDBs, which is what makes it very different from a lot of other neighbourhoods/places in Singapore. It has more than 15 Korean eateries, mainly K-BBQ, which is how it got the nickname, Little Korea.

I moved here with my family 5 years ago from Tampines when I was 14 and have been living here ever since. Although I've been living here for 5 years, I can't say that I know this place very well yet (mainly because I hardly left my house for the first 3.5 years). But now that I'm into photography and photojournalism, I decided to explore my neighbourhood a little more and show all of you around through my photos.

From the fitness corner to the large steps, you can already tell that it is very different as compared to most other neighbourhoods in Singapore. There are daily exercise lessons in the morning with blasting music. And it is not just one group of people exercising, but a few groups, ranging from normal exercise routines to Tai Chi and other forms of martial arts. There are also Pasar Malams that come every few months, where a few stalls will be set up along the road of Tanjong Pagar Plaza. There will be the standard Pasar Malam food and pottery and even plants being sold. Due to the space constraint, the Pasar Malams are always small scale, whereas places such as Tampines will have Pasar Malams that stretches across streets.

Of course, the most iconic part of Tanjong Pagar is Tanjong Pagar Plaza. It is made up of 8 blocks of flats, where 2 blocks are the market and all the first and sometimes second floors are filled with shops. There isn't a full scale supermarket like the one I'm used to at Tampines, so there are a lot of things that are not available here. The 'Market', which is block 5 and 6, has a hawker center on the second floor and is famous for a lot of types of food. From the Yong Tau Foo to the Nasi Lemak, a lot of the stalls have been on TV before and are worth trying and it is almost impossible to finish trying all the stalls since there are just too many. 

The other part of Tanjong Pagar, like I mentioned above, is the more city like part. It is filled with office workers, high rise buildings and hotels. There isn't any proper shopping malls (the nearest one would be either Chinatown Point or Vivo City), but there are office buildings and hotels with a small shopping center, such as Amara Hotel and International Plaza. It is also probably the only city area where you will see people in their home clothes or even pyjamas, because of how the flats are situated next to these high rise buildings.

There are many other roads and streets that are under Tanjong Pagar, such as Everton, Duxton, Cantonment and Yan Kit Road, a lot of which I have yet to explore, therefore I am unable to cover them here. But overall, Tanjong Pagar can be described as the neighbourhood of juxtaposition, with old and new buildings and a large portion of the population being the elderly. 

All photos were processed using VSCO Cam.

Less is More

Hi. My style of photography has always been to capture things that seem interesting to me, things that we see on an everyday basis but have never paid close attention to them. It was my goal to shine a different light on them and make them the subject in my photos. And I think I have succeeded in doing so, in a way. I always get weird looks from a lot of people when I'm taking my photos, most probably because they cannot comprehend the reason why I'm taking photos of a chair. But I think their perspective of that chair will change the next time they see it, and they'll hopefully find something interesting about it. I chose 3 photos for all of you to look at. 

A claw machine found in my old neighbourhood, Tampines

Trolleys found outside a supermarket

A spiral staircase at East Coast Park

I also came across this journal on VSCO, where the photographer mentioned the pros of doing film photography. One of the pros was planning what kind of photo you wanted to take and what story you wanted it to tell, in other words, to have intention before taking the photo instead of just blindly shooting and selecting afterwards. And this is where I derived the phrase "less is more", less photos but more intention. 

Now, you are probably wondering what's the link between the two. I wish to start taking photos with more intention and hopefully document more as well. These two photos are from my photo essay titled "Ahma" (which translates to grandmother), which was my final assignment for my photojournalism module. It was to show that the elderly are not as frail and grumpy as society depicts them to be and in fact, they are a joyous bunch who can do work too.

And that being said, that does not mean I will just stick to documenting. I will continue doing street photography as well, but hopefully, I'll put in more intention into my photos and think about what message I want to bring across as well. 

You can follow my progress on VSCO and Instagram as well. 

leexiuzheng.vsco.co

instagram.com/dustyrobe