School finished around 1pm daily. We'd go home and have lunch, do some homework and most of the time we'd meet again at school around 3pm. We played a lot of games: from jumping rope (made of rubber bands), police & thieves, hide-and-seek to marble balls and rollerskating, when we were older.
The game I enjoyed the most was hide-and-seek (when not being the seeker). It's fun because the school was HUGE. But we made an agreement to hide only at ground level.
To determine who would be the seeker, we played "Flip of Hands". You start with palm facing down (only one hand is needed), then chant a 4-line Hokkien rhyme while swaying your hand and at the end of each line, decide whether you want your palm facing up or down.
"La la li la tampung, (opening chant, meaningless)
Ah pek beh ah pong, (an old man sells ah pong - a kind of dessert)
Ah pong teem lo hai, (ah pong falls into the sea)
Ah pek jiak kao sai!" (old man eats dog poo)
The majority with the same sides of hands will be excluded from going into the second round. This will go on until one person becomes the minority and he or she will be the seeker. If the minority consists of two person, a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors (we call it One-Two-Tali-Som) will be carried out.
This hide-and-seek is a variant called "Kick the Can". As the name implies, a can is placed at the home base. When the seeker finds someone, he has to bring him or her back to the home base. The person has to wait there until everyone is found. However if at one point the seeker wanders too far off the home base and someone decides to come out from hiding, he or she can kick the can as far away as possible and the seeker has to return to can to home base. When the seeker is doing so, those who's already been found can go into hiding again!
Now come to think of it, what if the person who kicked the can was actually the person who'd been found when the seeker was not looking? Anyways I can't remember being the seeker (I'm sure I've had my fair share) but it sure was a thrill to kick the can real hard and watch the seeker cursing and swearing while everyone went hiding once more.
No comments:
Post a Comment