“Oh, that one out of stock. Will come in only next week."

It was not much to ask people to speak proper English.

Ah well. This is, after all, the Little Red Dot. No where in its name did it say it was an English-speaking Red Dot.

And the acoustical music textbook would have to wait.

With a mumbled word of thanks, I left the store.

That was a bummer. Today's classes were only from eight to ten in the morning, and now it was approaching eleven. I had not intended to make the trip but I did, and now I wanted to go home.

I would have taken the MRT (Mass-Rapid-Transit. Think ‘subway’ that’s clean, air conditioned and goes aboveground and underground) back. I didn't. I was short on ezlink cash (that’s the form of transport payment), and hard money to top it up.

That would mean the bus then. Thank goodness Clementi Bus Interchange had the service bus 166, which brought me right to the front of the little lane that led me home.

And I realised that the directions on the BlackBoard on how to get to Clementi Bookstore was very vague. I walked around the HDB town, searching for an NTUC FairPrice supermarket and could not find one. When I found it, I wandered full circle around the building and trailed off to its right and I finally found the store.

I was assured that I was going in the right direction when I spied senior Ian with (a girl) a plastic bag from the supermarket. Then I told myself he might be living nearby. The reputable senior made his way past me, chatting with the girl. I daren’t disturb him.

Back to the story.

Waiting at the station, I was the only one in queue and an old man later stood behind, while an elderly lady stood at the end of the metal railing.

It was a long wait. Thirty minutes wait, I'd wager, before the bus came. I had half the mind to throw

I was thinking to myself all that while if taking a bus home was a good idea.

MRT was a lot faster, I think. Or it could be the same amount of time. And that was all the MRT side of the argument had to hold. The bus was cooler (MRT aircons don't work as well), more likely to find a seat and sit all the way home, and it's MUCH MUCH cheaper too.

When the bus came, I did not regret. I found a seat with a large leg space and set my bag next to me on the two-seater chair. There was a fresh cool constant blast of air from above, and the mobile TV in front of me which was showing a sane lady with common sense and a ditzy badly-dressed girl who spoke with such an accent that I felt like taping her mouth shut with duck tape. Both were hosts for the art 'news' programme.

Turning my eyes away from the TV screen, I looked outside. The window was large, about half my height, so it gave me a great view of everything that passed the left of the bus. The Red Dot was a green country, and whoever who said that wasn’t lying. Green grass blanketed the hills and undisturbed land where buildings did not stand. This was often along the sides of the roads and the sides of the highway. Many buildings too sported something of a garden and greenery.

The bus went past Chinatown, which was prepped up for the mid-autumn festival. A myriad of coloured lanterns swung from the unlit lamp posts, and the moon-cake shops were a flurry of activity with the people buying the sweet delights by the box. I do like them, though I did not like some of the dry and flaky egg yolk fillings some of them had.

The shop-houses passed me by, figments of the little heritage my country could hold onto in a time of change and progression. The old often had to go, though some get preserved as national monuments or heritage sites. The shop houses, however, may have a short life. The old buildings were sporting cracks along the sides, something the new paint jobs they had had failed to cover or heal.

It also went past one of the universities the country had, and I loved the design and layout of the place. It was split into three buildings, each occupying a section of land and each had a ring of shrubbery that had chrysanthemums, heliconias and I think some purple-leafed sages. The canny thing about the university’s location was that it was on a piece of land that, long time ago, was just a patch of grass in the middle of the road, near the city central area. No one used that big triangle-shaped land. The government, however, decided to change that. They increased the land by a bit, chop it up into three, and placed the buildings there.

Good for a country with a lack of land area.

The bus passed by at least three malls along the way, with me making a mental note of which. Now I can tell my parents that I’m going to eat out after school and enjoy a movie instead of limiting myself to the mall near my home.

And when I got off at my stop, I realised that a good amount of time I would have used to stare lazily at other people’s faces on the train was used to gaze at greenery and percolate.

The fifty-minute ride home was worth it. At a cost of twenty-five cents to the gargantuan fine of a dollar fifty for the MRT ride, and I don't have to walk as much and I get a good view of the outside world.

I think I'll take the bus home on early days, then.