The Building.

It was impulsive, but i had that sudden rush that forces me to do things without thinking without planning, that thing which some people say I am famous for, that "lets go...now" kind of thing. It started with a phone call to Mark/Aaron "Dude, lets go to sentosa, I want to take pictures of The Building before they knock it down" As always, they were game. A quick post in the forum a couple of hurried calls and we were set, 12 people on a quick trip to sentosa. At midnight I called Sherwin and told him the numbers, he was game to. And so at 830 this morning we met at tampines mrt for the long haul to sentosa. Two trains, a bus and an hour later we were there, the dark clouds seemed to be gathering only over Sentosa...ominous rumbling could be heard in the distance and yes once we purchased the tickets...the deluge began. go figure. En route to our designated shelter we were or I was anyway very very disappointed to find The Building under total reconstruction, a fresh coat of paint and the surround area bulldozed. Demoralized? that is not a strong enough word. It seemed the entire objective of my trip was blown apart. After munching for abit at burger king we decided to recce the area behind The Building, and there low an behold my mistake was made clear and all was good with the world! The building under repair wasn’t The Building we had come to see! nonono Our Building was still standing derelict and as always loved only by we few...we sentimental few. They don’t build them like this anymore. The history of this building seems to be shrouded in mystery, and if u look at some of my earlier post you will see a couple of pics of it somewhere. Was it a hospital? was it an officer’s barracks? was it just and Office building? no one seems to know and that is why i call it simply The Building. The Sentosa Dev Corp who run the island were very vague and unclear when I made my enquires. So as yet we have no information on the building. But we shall preserver.

The walk around the building was done in two parts first a recce with the whole troop to scout out locations to shoot, then after the bulk of the gang split to hit the beach, the Photo Group went round and started to take pics. Between Sherwin and I we took around 300-350 pics some duplicate of course. We DID not do a complete exercise for two reasons. Firstly by my sheer carelessness I stepped on a nail that speared my foot through my converse rubber soled sandal. Secondly...well we shall leave that out for the moment. In some of the areas such as the building within the grounds of The Building the standard of workmanship and materials were of a tremendously high quality. The wooden floor was in great shape along with wooden grips on the stairs. In most areas there where holes in the ceilings and in some parts complete sections of roof have disappeared completely, an example is the room that is overgrown with vegetation.
There are also a large number of bats that live within the rooms on the second floor, we could hear them from the ground floor and could smell them a long way off as well. Several of the rooms were covered in guano and the walls were stained with streaks of bat droppings. This really was the most unpleasant aspect of the day, the smell. aside from being stabbed in the foot of course.
After our little expedition we rendezvoused with the rest of the boys who were attempting to skim the waves with a skim board...there were not very successful. We spent some time wandering around the Silso and Palawan beaches and ended up with a couple of the boys getting tattoos...albeit fake ones. After a rather an interesting day, we sat down and had a beer at Sunset Bay. All in all I think everyone enjoyed themselves. So another day and another adventure....what’s next? Let’s see where the wind takes us eh.

All pictures are less then a third of their original size.(resized for posting reasons) Any typos, grammatical errors should be copied and sent to the straits times care of the editor, i am sure he will liek to see them.