My mother used to bring my brother and I along on her Sunday morning marketing sprees. It was a market hub, if you like. There were the wet market, hawker center and provision shops-cum-shop houses.

Smack right in the heart of the market square was a two-storeyed building. On the top tier was the wet market, which I seldom ventured into, as it was haggling-housewives territory. The only thing I learned was that hawkers wore black rubber boots to help them navigate the slippery wet floor. Whereas construction workers wore yellow rubber boots as they were fans of the Pet Shop Boys. Apparently.

The wet market had a distinctive smell. There were the stinky slabs of pinkish meat (fresh!) hanging from dull metal hooks in all their flabby glory, the soiled roots of greens (fresh!) and the foul-smelling fowl (very fresh!) clucking away for all they were worth in their small metal cage prisons. Somehow my mother has always accused me of being unappreciative of her culinary efforts.

My favorite section of the top floor was the aquarium, where you found live fish swimming blissfully around, oblivious to the stench around them. Cans of fish feed and disinfectants were stacked up neatly on the wooden cabinet display, but the coolest exhibit for me was undoubtedly the tubifex worms. Wriggly, bloody and not highly intelligent, they were bred in one orgy of a tank, pondering their insignificance in the wider scheme of the universe.

Had my Sunday breakfast in the hawker center, just below the wet market. It had a very high ceiling, and one probably needed a magic beanstalk to wipe the ceiling fans clean. Though no one could bother to go that far up to check the condition of the fans. Same thing for the fluorescent lights. Hence the dim lighting and dungeon-esque atmosphere.

On the same floor were two back-to-back rows of shops. There was the market boutique, herb store, hardware store, shop selling miscellaneous stuff and toy store. The latter didn't have the latest line of Hasbro and Mattel products, but it did have a cool range of Ultraman models, which were laid down on a large canvas sheet in front of the store.

The only food stall I still remember was the dou-hua stall, tucked away in the foremost corner on the floor. The owner had a distinctive moustache, not those thick bushy ones, but more like the neat Lin Zhixiang variety.

T'was a little unfussy white-tiled store, with nothing but soya bean and man inside. The cold drink was housed in a transparent plastic container in the stall front. Large ice blocks were left bobbling about in it, and whenever Lin Zhixiang scooped out a tinful of soya milk, a quirky "goooruuk" sound was produced. The hot soya milk preferred by grumpy old folk was stored at the back in a metal cylinder. Whenever I had one of those persistent coughs, my tongue would have to burnt with the scalding soya milk. If I had to burn my tongue every morning I would turn out to be a grumpy senior citizen too.

After breakfast my mother would be off to do her marketing while I just bummed around with my brother. Sometimes we played hide-and-seek with the hawkers' similarly young and bored children (but nobody would ever hide in the stinky wet market), at other times we would sit in at the toy store or clothes boutique (special privilege for Very-Frequent-Customer's sons) until our mother picked us up around noon. T'was how I wasted my Sunday mornings, really, and t'is how you wasted your time reading this irrelevant page.