oep @ vietnam |day 1|
Sunday, January 20
woah, long time since i've come to this page... but i'm here to blog finally! not sure when the next one will be, but oh well, it's a start, isnt it?
first day was the flight obviously. but since theres nothing much about that, it wouldn't make a nice juicy post at all. so lets backtrack a bit to earlier in the day, where we had to go to school.
we had to practice our silly item for the le hong phong high school for the gifted in vietnam, and we hadnt even chosen an item to present. ian kept on wanting us to do hossan leong's song, which many of us didnt like at all. so mr jason chan suggested rasa sayang, the dick lee version.
in the end, nobody could settle on anything, so we left school at 10am without bothering about what misfortune would befall us if we didnt put up a good show.
i don't exactly know why we were all rushing to get home, after all we'd all already finished packing, and there isnt exactly much to watch on tv at this time except kiddie shows. perhaps its just the enjoyment of getting home early.
so jie jun, jonathan and i were walking outta school to the bus stop, the security guards who were slacking in their guard post called out to us and asked us to go to them. how lazy of them, sitting around sluggishly in their guardhouse. cant they come out if they wanna stop us... imagine a terrorist running out of the school, and they still wanna sit in there and call the terrorist to go over to them... like who would listen...
well anyway, i decided to be nice to them, and called jie jun and jonathan to go to them with me, since they just carried on walking obliviously. so the security guard asked us why we're leaving etc, all the usual. makes me wonder why the school didn't even inform them that we're allowed to leave the school early... like where's your common sense people!
well the security guards let us go off once they saw other people from our class coming down the slope.
so we continued on to the bus stop, and it wasnt long before the bus 74 arrived. how lovely, i could go off with the mrt people, and not be left behind all alone... totally hate that.
well i went to the top deck and i was angry that nobody followed me up so i just stayed up there, since i couldn't be bothered to go down. then when we were nearing the bus stop before the mrt bus stop, i took out my handphone to send a lame sms to jonathan like "bye bye dear, see you at the airport! muahx!" heh, that sounds so weird right now... anyway, i took out my handphone and on the screen i saw "Jonathan 15". well my handphone shows all notes on my calendar on the active standby screen, so "Jonathan 15" means its jonathan's birthday and he's turning 15.
so i quickly rushed down and said "happy birthday" to jonathan. at first he looked kinda confused so i thought i got the date wrong. i quickly asked him, "it IS your birthday isnt it?" then he said, "yea..." -dead silence- i was kinda expecting wei jian , isaac and/or jie jun, who were like next to him, to wish him happy b'day too, but they dint say anything, so i presumed they already wished him happy birthday.
well after that they alighted and i continued my uneventful journey back home with isaac, though he initially invited me to go kaps with him. but he decided not to after he saw his bus in front of 74, so i just went home like nothing happened, and grabbed a few snacks for the trip from esso.
now lets skip forward to the airport, cos nothing happened between reaching home and going to the airport.
i arrived at the airport on the dot, and when i went through the doors, everyone was going to the check-in counters. so i quickly got my passport from mr jason chan, and queued up at the back. only like 3 counters for the 90+ of us, sure was gonna take some time.
then another counter opened, and the airport staff asked darren ng, who was just in front of me, to go to that line. so while all the other 3.9ers were in the other 3 queues, i was in the 2nd place of the 4th queue :P i got through check-in much faster than almost all of them, and all of them were pissed off with me XD oh wellz.
we started comparing seat numbers, and i found out i was sitting next to samuel yee! only we were separated by the aisle. i asked around for a while more, and i still couldn't find out who was sitting on my right.
mr tan, who's the i/c of the trip, gave us a talk, which only the people in a 1m radius around him could hear, and the other teachers scolded those behind for not listening. as if we could help it... all we could see was his mouth moving, and not a squeak. then dr ong came and gave some speech, which also none of us could hear. then he prayed for us, and we had to keep our heads bowed without hearing anything, with no indication of when the prayer was over so we could lift up our heads. oh well, a prayer is still a prayer, even though you cant hear it.
so after that we started walking around the airport, browsing through the shops. the items there are like so super expensive... wonder who would buy anything from there, even though it may be duty free.
to kill time, a whole group of us took the sky train to terminal 3 (we were at terminal 2) without the teachers knowing, and we were kinda scared, after the doors closed, that we wouldn't make it back in time to get to the gate. so we were panicking in the sky train, and were relieved when it ended a short distance away.
then samuel yee had this brilliant idea that you had to get out and board another sky train to get back to terminal 2, so we rushed out while we could, only to see a screen above us saying "Sky Train to Terminal 2". so we all had to rush back in, just before the doors closed. thank goodness we got back to the terminal in time, and there were no teachers around, so we weren't seen getting off the sky train. if not, who knows what would have happened to us :S
well when we went to the gate, we had to go through the security check again, and i forgot to finish drinking my water, so they threw they water away. at least there wasn't much left. why don't they think about water wastage, after all their water saving campaigns. tsk tsk tsk. just look at the authorities throwing away water like nobody's business.
so then we had to fill in the immigration cards for vietnam, and the card said we had to use black or green ink, cos the squares were like blue... how retarded. so i used my green pen to fill it in. after i was done, faraz from 3.13 borrowed my pen, and said he'd return it to me on the plane, cos we needed to board and he wasnt done. up till now he hasnt returned it, and according to swathikan: never lend anything to faraz. too bad i learnt it the hard way...
so when we boarded the plane, i finally found out who the person next to me was. i dont know what his name is, but i know him by face, and at least he's a nice guy.
halfway through the flight, samuel yee asked for a pack of cards from the air stewardess, who then told him that they were told not to give the students any cards >:( looks like the teachers really covered everything. turns out that ms ong talked to the air stewardess and told her that they didn't want any students having cards for the trip. not that it stopped anyone from bringing it... :P shhhhhh!
then after tea/dinner was served, ms ong passed me a cake, which apparently was given to jonathan by the cabin crew cos they found out its his birthday :P like how cool is that. according to jonathan, this is what happened:
jonathan was finishing his tea/dinner, when the air steward came to his row and said, "oh don't eat that cake (the slice that was served for desert), this one's better." and he placed a cake in front of him. then jonathan cut the cake, with ms ong taking pics and videos, since she was sitting a seat away from him. then ms ong asked who he wanted to pass the cake to, and i was one of the lucky few :D
so after we touched down and got off the plane, i asked jonathan whether anyone else knew it was his birthday, then he said that i was the first to say it, and nobody else had said it till the cake came :P and even then only mark and ms ong said it. how terrible. even people like jie jun, ian and ryan were standing nearby and listening, and didn't wish him a happy birthday. tsk tsk tsk
so we collected our luggage, and several of us found our padlock gone! obviously suspecting foulplay, we opened our luggage and checked whether anything was stolen. thank goodness i had all my valuables with me. and nothing got stolen from anyone. adriel had also gone to report it to the authorities with a teacher, and they just said, "oh, it must have caught on to something while being transported and broke." what utter rubbish! its kinda obvious that they're just covering up for the corruption of the employees.
then we all got into a virgin bus (which means we're the first people who travel in it) to go to our dinner place. it was some italian restaurant, but when we went inside, we were all served asian food. what kinda misleading restaurant is this...
most of us didn't eat much, since we already ate on the plane, but we still ate just to fill up the empty space anyway.
then after that, jonathan and 3 others, i think including samuel ong (not yee) had a birthday cake, though jonathan was the only guy whose birthday was on the exact day. so since we were full, the tour guides kept the cake for the next day.
we got back on the bus to go to the hotel, and lo and behold, i was told i was rooming with somebody from 3.3... lucky me. thank goodness it wasnt shaun/shawn/sean khoo, whichever spelling his name uses, cos i'd just die there if it were him. at first i didn't know the guy's name at all, but i later found out (like on day 3 or 4), heh. kinda slow eh? oh wellz. what can you expect.
so nothing happened that night, since everyone was tired and just wanted to sleep.
oh right, the teachers had the nerve to come disturbing us during the night for room check, and they just had to check when we were all asleep... so they rang the doorbell a few times and woke me up, and i had to answer. apparently they called the phones of the rooms that didn't answer the door. and once again, lucky me had 2 sets of teachers checking up on us, 1 from my class, 3.9, ant another from 3.3, to check on their student. and both times i had to answer the door cos my roommate was asleep. how retarded.
i've reached the end of my first blog post of 2008! i wonder how long i'll take to cover all of the 7 or 8 days in vietnam, esp since i took so long just on day 1, which wasn't a full day at all :P well hope you liked reading this post anyways, with every detail taken care of (:
-completed 26 jan '08-
AMEN;
9:29 pm
