five years ago, larkin to me was only significant with the infamous kacang pol cuisine. when i entered desa tun, the significance altered to the word 'terminal' since my friends who originated from outside johore would go there to take bus home, each long overnight outing.
this is a short tribute to larkin as for its undeniably large contribution to the community until september 2019, so, enjoy :)
the taman bunga raya / taman linear
in 2017, the pentaksiran tingkatan 3 (pt3) candidates were assigned with a geography task to study potential areas for furthering developments. we were grouped into four large groups and later divided into smaller ones. my group's study field was at taman merdeka. it was honestly so grieving seeing old images of the place when it was still lively with incessant visits from locals and tourists. as we came there, a huge part of the liveliness had disappeared from the closed kiosks to faded building paints and lesser visitors. the water fountain no longer spouted water embellished with iridescent lights at night. some hidden drinks stalls stood still, but with very limited workers and varieties, and a pretty long waiting queue. a few statues or buildings as well, was broken and devastated. the main lake was becoming more cloudy each day due to the peat soil. to recall it all, we provided some imaginative plans including building mini skating rink and so canoeing boats with lake-cleaning technology as introduced by utem if i am not wrong.
on the other hand, another group had to work on the brainstorming project of taman linear as known as taman bunga raya which venued right across our school.
the park had opened its doors to the public recently and received an encouraging feedback. it was full on both weekdays and weekends where people would only leave at dusk or come at 2 a.m. to jog. accomodated with playground, toilet, parking lots, praying room, food trucks and many more, the park had really changed face from its 2015 landscape. finally the awaited-for-months had ended, and the taman linear group was really proud of their ideas being transformed into reality, if so.
because as our geography task was revealed last time, emerged a hearsay saying that the education ministry conspired with the development ministry as their town planner ran out of idea lmao.
the zoo
during last year's school level kesuma (a three-day-and-two-night hostel house programme), the school sponsored some myr2 tickets to zoo johor for the participants. it was sort of an outreach slot, volunteering-based.
again, we parted into groups and i had to be in the group who would clean the huge cat's cage, yes, you guessed right. tigers.
so the entrance into the cage connected with the sunbears' cage. we got to see how the workers prepared the bears' food using a sack of hard buns and cans of condensed milk. the buns were crushed into bits, mixed with the milk and pipe water before served. i thought bears were supposed to be fed with fresh fish (?) other friends had to lift the super enormous elephants' faeces and also dealt with the nasty chimpanzees trying to reach their face as they enter the open cage.
we also stopped by the food stalls, and to no surprise the price was quite costly. even the simple thumb-sized keychain was priced myr7. i have heard that the zoo was way livelier during the reign of the late sultan iskandar as his majesty was cited as an animal lover. however the cages then looked so lousy and dull with its animals appearing thinner than the ones you saw seven to eight years ago. still, the thin tiger's roar still scared me to the bone as it literally roars next to my left ear (the passage to the open cage is so narrow that could only fit two people of my size).
to reason to this, many local zoos are now lacking of fund, if you read some sunfloweraidil's tweets or any other informations. from my seeing, most of zoo johor's visitors were europe, arabic or indonesian citizens.
in one of my interviews, i met a chinese boy aged fifteen or fourteen. his mother was well-responsive since she insisted on her son improving his malay, but the boy profusely refused to speak malay, so we just went on using english.
all in all, johor bahru my city of birth - is such a beautiful and deadly place. it has so much to proffer from a promising finance to higher level of living. though i don't live here in my first twelve years of living, the memories and views i've captured during my times in desa tun is just priceless.
this is all for now :)
