When hunger strikes

Was chatting with Noon last night while preparing our dinner together. We somehow strayed into talking about my time spent at boarding school in Singapore. More specifically what I had to do at nights when I was hungry and it was almost time for lights-out.

Mind you, the situation was not limited to just myself, it was pretty much the majority of the student population as well.

By far the most convenient and satisfying quickie snack/meal was the Instant Noodle.

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All hail the almighty Instant Noodle.

Saviour of the rumbling belly, banisher of hunger pangs, redeemer of the less-than-satisfied appetite, able to banish late-night cravings in a mere 2 minutes, packaged conveniently in a hand-sized packet, packing sachets of delicious and flavoursome MSG goodness.

God to students/busy executives/single parents/children/adults of all ages, from all walks of life!

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*Sigh*

Okay, back to boarding school. That place was a hole.

Meals would quite often be less than satisfying (a VERY generous statement, believe me!) and many a student would go to bed hungry. So, what were we to do? There were no amenities available to us, no refrigerators to store food or snacks, no hot water dispensers to fix up that late-night cup of tea/milo/hot chocolate. It was also a standing rule that no electrical appliances were allowed to be kept or used by students in their rooms.

So here we were - hungry kids with packets of Instant Noodles in our hands looking for a means of cooking them. The only source of hot water was... the showers! I kid you not, the showers were the only place we could get hot water from at that time of the night.

And even then, life was never quite so simple. You see, the toilets we had in the dormitory corridors did not have hot water! Only the large communal bathrooms on the lower floors had hot water showers in them, and these lower floors got locked prior to lights-out.

Being the ever resourceful individuals that we were (motivated by rumbling tummies), we worked out a way to get to these bathrooms. All action had to be carried out under the cover of darkness after lights-out and after the Housemaster had made his inspection rounds. Preparations had been made previously by rigging the locks in the stairwell doors so that they didn't engage by virtue of bits of paper being stuck into latching holes of said locks.

The designated lookouts would signal when the Housemaster had completed his post lights-out inspection rounds and a team would head to the stairwells. The doors would be pushed open and the bits of paper removed to hide any evidence of tampering. One person would remain on lookout duty while the rest would head into the bathrooms and start running the showers to get hot water for soaking the noodle cakes. Once the containers had been filled, we'd make our way back as quietly as we could back upstairs and into our rooms (it was too risky to stay downstairs in the bathrooms).

And so it was that after all this effort, we would have in our hot little hands a luke-warm half-cooked too-diluted serving of Instant Noodles! Still quite palatable, and the most important thing was that one did not have to go to bed hungry.

Some people did this more often than others, some carried out the operation solo when nobody else could be roped in, and some people would choose not take the risk and instead ate the noodle cakes raw. And from time to time, some people would get caught and had to face the consequences.

I hated my time there, 4 years of my life lost to that place. The whole experience had left an indelible mark on my character, I believe. And perhaps my indulgences now (where food is concerned) is a direct result of the experience described above... well, part of it anyway.