Have any of y'all noticed that the new Prudential insurance company advertisement included footage of snow falling in the Central Business District (with the OUB building and all behind) and kids were playing with it?

As a kid, have you always dreamt of touching snow and find out what it was really like? Have you always envied those kids in your class who have visited some temperate country during winter and have seen snow? Come on, I'm sure you have!

Okay, here's another question: how many of you have eaten ice kachang? You all have. Maybe some of you can't even conceive without it, especially when Singapore has such hot and humid weather all year round. Nothing was better than digging into a tall mound of ice shavings coated in syrup of various colours (while ignoring all the other ingredients under the ice shavings) with a little plastic spoon and shoving it into your mouth and feeling the texture of the ice that is almost magical.

And then, finally you get to see and touch your first snowflakes. "Hey, it's just like ice kachang!" you cry out.

Gee... that must be a tropical zone thing... virtually every Singaporean (including yours truly) I know have compared snow with the local desert, ice kachang. One even remarked that she could easily go into the ice kachang business with all that snow around her while visiting a temperate area during winter. Singaporeans are so snow-hungry that the Singapore Science Center built "Snow City"— an indoor snow-play area with snow generated from specially designed snow guns. I was curious enough to find out what the fuss was all about. I visited Snow City. There was a snow slide and playground in the interior and the temperature was set at -15°C and there was, true enough, snow. But the snow was too hard for building snowmen and making snowballs. Maybe good enough to ski on, but there wasn't enough space for that. Well, for me the fun part was freezing in the enclosure. Before stepping back out to 30°C air again, my only comment was, "I bet an ice kachang-making machine could do a better job!"