Nostalgic snacks - funny faces and sunny boys

Well, the heat is beginning to creep in. Summer is just around the corner. This is kind of like deja vu. I would have spent a total of 5 months of summer this year by the end of my stay in Australia. Will I ever see winter again?

Did you know at the 7-11’s on Hong Kong don't sell icees/slurpees. I wonder why they banned them? Currently, I am on a mission to find Funny Faces and Sunny Boys. There is a rumour flying around that Sunny Boys can be located at Bi-Lo (a no frills supermarket chain). My problem is that I need to locate a Bi-Lo. The search continues.

I ate my first Funny Face when I was in prep (age 6 or thereabouts). Funny Faces are frozen tubes of artificially flavoured and coloured of ice that come in a plastic tube with a picture of a funny face monster printed on it - hence the name. You can get green, red, blue (my favourite because it made me look like a blue-tongued lizard), ice-coloured and orange ones. Each of the colours has a name given to them depending on the monster. In 1980, they use to cost around 15 cents at the canteen. Remember when you can buy two cents and five cents pieces of liquorice as well? The price of a Sunny Boy was 20 cents.

Sunny Boys are similar to Funny Faces except they pyramid-shaped ice blocks in a tetra pak. However, I always found them really hard to open if the canteen mum hadn't already made an incision with a pair of scissors. I sometimes wondered if this was a conspiracy on the part of the canteen mum because they wanted kids to stop buying them for health reasons.

Eating SBs are also a challenge for youngsters because of their odd shape. You have to push just the right amount of ice chunk to suck/munch and oft times (and if you were greedy like me), you might push the frozen chunk too high and it will land up on the ground. I remember once in the playground my sister gave me her remaining chunk of ice and we were playing on these huge tractor tyres and I accidentally dropped the ice into the tyre. What’s a kid to do but start bawling. So then my sister picked it up and ran to the water tap and resuscitated it again under the water. My sister is great like that, I thought WOW she is so clever! Nowadays the five second rule applies.

I also remember making my own SBs by putting OJ in a mug and sticking in the freezer. But it was never quite the same. Years later they invented the slush mug. Remember those? It was kind of like an mug-shaped esky that came with its own “special” plastic spoon. You put the mug in the freezer, after a couple of hours you pour your drink of choice into it, stir it with the spoon and you get chunks of slurpee. Anyway, I wanted one but my mum wouldn’t let me get one because they were too expensive for a bit of plastic.

Funny Faces could be consumed at little lunch but to consume a SB it needed to be big lunch. I don’t think anyone attempted to eat a SB at little lunch. It was too big a risk for fear of not being able to finish before the bell rang. If I were a primary school teacher (for a day), I'll enforce the SB rule. If you can't finish your SB, you can slurp in class even after the bell rings.

Too bad we can’t put our names on a brown paper bag with what we want for lunch anymore. I feel like party mini pies with tomato sauce now. Oh, I just remembered the thrill of being nominated to take the basket of orders to the canteen. There is an official name for them. I think it's canteen basket monitor. Or is it carrier? I should put that in my CV. It’s up there with being an editor.

Actually, do kids still order lunch by sticking change in a brown paper bag? Some homework for my readers. Let me know.