When I was five, we won a couple of goldfish at a fair. They travelled halfway across the country in a tiny sweet jar.
Then sat around in a salad bowl dodging cats for another 10 hours while my dear mother went about trying to find a tank going cheap (the family was quite poor).
Then we went down to he beach and got a bunch of sand and some driftwood, rinsed them once under a tap, filled the tank from the tap, and dumped the goldies in.
For the next few days we fed them small amounts of leftover food from our dinners, which they loved. When we had algae, we dropped a few snails in. We never heated or filtered the water, and did a complete water change every month or so, using untreated tap water.
These poor abused goldfish lived quite a while; one died the year I started secondary school (he was 8, assuming he was 0 when we got him) and the second died another two years after that.
Roll on the clock another 11 years, I'm earning a fair bit of money and get nostalgic. I headed down to petsathome (like a pet department store in a warehouse) and had a goosie at the goldies.
Then I looked over the rest of the fish, and literally fell head over heels in love with some dalmation mollies. One 62L tank, heater, cycle, filter, expensive plant setup later, and I've got three dalmation molly girls (not named yet) and a silver boy. Who will be looked after much better than Terminator and Chips ever were.
