Nor's Paradise

My kampung life

It is a pleasure for me to talk about my kampung life.As a kid i am a hardcore kampung girl.I was brought up in a small village in kelantan.My house is surrounded by a mini jungle.When i was young , there was a rubber plantation around the house.As the rubber tree was getting old and produced less latex, My father cut it off and sold it to the furniture maker.

I remember when i was young the bushes around my house was my playground.With my sister(2 years younger, now a doctor in terengganu) and brother(4 years younger, working here in penang in one of the MNC company) we explored every inches of the bushes. Our snack is rather simple...hahaa..we use to chew buah kenerai/cenerai, the small green berries produced by a small tree.The fruit is useful as bullets for our bamboo gun too....Or sometime we just chew pucuk kandis ( yarghhh.... its really sour until you can feel the pulling effect at your jaw...) with pinch of salt.It's like you're chewing a buble gum..... you suck the liquid away and spit out the hampas...:). One thing i really dont like about this pucuk kandis(garcinia spp.) is it will give you a bitter taste that last for quite sometime. other snack are buah mata ayam(ardisia crispa), buah samak(euginia palembanica) and buah kerian.

with a group of friends we used to play police sentry at the bendang there.There were a few time when one of the midwife in my kampung ask us to pick the rumput jarum Emas(striga asiatica) for her as one of the ingridient for the afterbirth medicine. She paid us rm0.40 for every grip of dried jarum mas, which was a big deal for us at that time.So instead of playing police sentry we kept racing for the jarum emas, which sometime turned into fight....:) some have scars to prove that...(grin)

i have sweet memories of catching fish, swimming in the swamp, rolling over the hill of grasses and paddy straw.Sometime when i close my eyes, I still the smell the grass, the paddy field and the mud.There was one time when i catched a snake with my bare hand, mistaken it for a fish.Litle that i know that the snake also in the same mission as me, try to catch the fish for dinner...:)

life was hard...really , really hard, but when i look back, i just remember those old sweet memories.We used to enjoy our sweet time, lying down on the field watching the sky and try to figure out the cloud shape. But watch out!!!...while lying down my mother said you should not let the eagle fly over you or you will be a dead meat.Hahaha... now i know my mothers bluff just not to let us lie on the ground and dirty our shirts, as we dont have many.

I guess that experience brought me up to be what i am today. Even i've been living in the city for more than 10 years, i still crave for the kampung life.My husband is the opposite, he has been brought up in the city and used to stay in city for the whole life.

i'll talk more about my kampung life next time... till then ...bye..