In The Land of Lego

Reminiscing of the things past as a kid who loved constructing things just to tear it down with much satisfaction, and then rebuild another - usually buildings or the whole town blocks - and brought them down again with quite much planned details as much as a preschool kid could have imagined (like an attack of a vicious gargantuan lizard i.e. Gojira, stormed by a foreign troops invading LEGOLand, or struck by a deadly natural disaster), it seemed very much appropriate when our parents gave me and my younger brother a LEGO set to played with.

It was only a small set designed to be built as a 2-storey house. Perhaps it was the least complicated set, and maybe also the cheapest. But as little kids with broad imaginations, we rarely took it as barriers. Instead, we made it into many variations of sets to support our story-telling powerhouse.
Other than the aforementioned stories, we did a 'play' on our version of soap-opera kind of Dynasty, or as a murder-mystery crime scene that was Murder She Wrote, or as background for a micro-sized reconstruction of last night Amazing Stories.

And when we finally fed up using it as a mere house just like it was intended to be on the first place, we challenged ourselves and constructed many other things instead. It became a thing like trailer-home towed by a plastic 'Made in Taiwan' truck, an exotic shrine for some kind of ancient occult built deep in a dark-mysterious jungle (which translated from our unmowned lawn), or a spaceship created to explore the inscrutable Mars (i.e. my sisters' room).

Oh, boy!

Even when I'm recollecting these years old, previously forgotten memories, I still recalled the fun and cheerful moments we had back then.

That was why I spent almost an hour at Senayan City's atrium last December when LEGO made a new national record in building the biggest miniature city super-blocks ever, complete with skyscrapers, suburbans, a port and an airport (ships and a miniature jumbo jet included).

Admiring the displayed details very much, I was rather more impressed when an older guy looked happily toying with a bajaj LEGO! It seemed that without my knowledge, LEGO has gone local. Wow, that's amazing!

I wonder what other localized models it had produced in the past decades and are already available in stores.

And then I smiled to myself seeing this guy's wide grin as he proudly exhibited the orange three-wheels vehicle - miniature model of the silent witness of the old Jakarta - to his son.

Now I believe that I'm not the only mature guy who still loves playing around with his childhood toys once in a while ("Am looking at you, Eri!"). And certainly, I'm not alone in wanting to congratulate LEGO on it's 50th Anniversary.

"Happy fiftieth anniversary, LEGO! I'll heart you always!"