You will never what kind of thing that will make you nostalgic and that will trigger your trip back to the past. For me, for this particular article it was rubber band. Rubber bands, those little round, stretchable and elastic things. I can't believe that I can see my whole childhood clearly just with the help of rubber bands.
Kids today, have a huge number of toys at their disposal. Back then we follow the trend or we make do on what we currently have. Be it sticks, plants, sand or just whatever it is in our sight.
Plants
I remember that we used to play with gumamela (hibiscus) plant back in the day. Its flowers can be beaten into a pulp and it will produce bubbles. We will use a small stem of Papaya leave as a straw, we will dip it into the gumamela solution and we will blow into the papaya stem to make some bubbles floating around. We will then try to pop as many bubbles as we can or we will have a contest of how longer a bubble can float without it popping.
Star apple's leaves are quite fun to play with too. The sap from the end of its leaf is quite sticky and we make the whole thing into a dangling earring. Well, that was fashion back then. And from those leaves, we can create a small functional pinwheel. Imagine that.
Stones
It may sound weird now, but we also collected and played with stones back then. We will roam around the neighborhood and collect some good looking rocks and stones. We will then play a game called "tatsing". I am not sure if I remember the mechanics clearly but it goes something like this:
We draw a small square on the ground. Yes this should be played on the ground and you shall feel the soil beneath your feet. All of the players will then place an equal number of stones inside the square as bets. The goal of the game is to gather all the stones in play until the other players don't have stones to bet anymore. You can collect and gather a stone if you are able to hit a stone out of the square using another stone as your "pato" or for the lack of better word, your weapon.
The game enhances your eye, hand and feet coordination. From a distance you will aim towards the square where the stones are laid out and try to hit them outside the square, if you manage to hit stones to go outside the square and your weapon is also out of the square, you get the hit stones and they are yours. The game is done, if there are no more stones inside the square or only one player is left. You can out other players by hitting their weapons with yours.
At the end of the day, all the winnings are then thrown away in the lake or in the backyard because if you bring those rocks inside the house, you will be in for the scolding of your life.
Rubber Bands
We also had a lot of fun playing with rubber bands. Aside from the occasional slingshot fights using them, there are several ways we enjoyed this multi-purpose piece of stretchy goodness.
Using our the fingers in our hands and a piece of rubber band, we can make some really intricate figures such as star, a double star, a house and other stuff.
The faster you can make something out of that thing, the better you are. We also played with them as a sort of gambling. The bets are rubber bands, and the game is quite easy and fun.
From a designated throwing point, usually a line is drawn on the ground to indicate the throwing point, we toss rubber bands as far as we could. The next player then will try to land another rubber band on top of the previous player's rubber band. If the two bands overlap each other, the player who threw the last band will have all the rubber bands involved in the overlapping figures and then the next player throws a rubber band again. The goal is to rid your opponents of all their rubber bands.
We also have another game with rubber bands called "dampa". The goal also is to make an overlapping circle with your rubber band and your opponent's. But this time, instead of tossing the rubber band, it is done a little bit differently. You and the your opponent will start from different side of a room, or just any place with a floor. One rubber band is in front of you, and another one is in front of your rival. Basically, you will meet on the middle until there is an overlapping circle between the two bands. But you can only use the force of the air to make the bands move. And no, you cannot blow on them.
The right way is to cup your hand a little bit and hit the floor with the palm of your hand. The air that will be released from the impact will move the rubber band towards the middle. Again, the goal is to collect all the playable rubber bands, or until your hands are numb.
After collecting a lot of rubber bands from innocent playmates, you can now braid the rubber bands together to make a long chain of rubber bands and play a game called Chinese garter. It's like reverse limbo rock. Instead of passing through the limbo below, you are to overcome the band by jumping over it, instead of lowering, the hurdle goes up as high as the other players could reach.
There are so much more simple things back then that we used as toys. No PSP's, no nintendo DS, no iPads and tablets. Everything was within our reach and we still enjoy every play time we can get. Life was much simpler while the games were more fun to play and definitely builds personalities.
Hey there!
Thank you for reading this one. I really appreciate you taking time in visiting here. What about you? Any common materials you played back then? Ahh, the fun times. You will never believe, how many samurais and ninjas I fought back then with a katana (twig from behind the house) I mastered.
You have any thoughts about the good old days? I'd love to hear from you in the comment section below. Again thanks, and as always... cheers!!!
Sources :
Lead Image : https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/rubber-band-thumb/
Image 1 : https://www.pinoypopculture.com/2014/02/flower-of-gumamela-hibiscus-plant.html
Image 2 : https://unsplash.com/s/photos/stones
Image 3 : https://www.treehugger.com/clever-uses-for-rubber-bands-4858679
i remember all those games XD especially the gumamela one. we would play with that at least every other day because there were plenty of that around the neighborhood