Thursday, March 08, 2007

Monash Orientation Party 2007 (Sem One)

I've been to Genting Highlands many times more than the average person. This semester's orientation party for the freshies (on Saturday, 3rd of March) gave me an excuse to head up the mountain yet again, and to post a bunch of pictures for not much reason at all.

Acting cool for the camera... and failing miserably.

Typically, a Genting trip involves going on the several more interesting rides in the theme park. Hence, the trip began with the Buddies (the orientation facilitators) leading groups of students on routes towards those rides. The first two on my group's route were closed, so we went straight to the Spinner, a not-so-thrilling warm-up ride before we headed to the other marginally-more-thrilling rides (hey, it's Genting).

It caused chronic dizziness, though.

Next on the list was the flume ride. After a relatively short queue time of about 20 minutes, we finally got the chance to get wet.

Things like these never get old.

After that I got myself dried. Who said Malaysians were stingy?

And then we headed to a proper rollercoaster, the Corkscrew. Unfortunately, the designated cameraman wasn't around to snap any pictures. Even more unfortunately, a group of freshies have yet to send me a scan of the on-ride photo that was taken...

What's left on the interesting ride list was the only one still worth riding in Genting, in my opinion; the Space Shot. It's the one thing that still induced that piss-in-my-bloody-pants feeling I could find in the whole, wretched, theme park deprived country. Bah.

Having two girl friends screaming hysterically next to you adds to the fun.
And then there's that urban legend about the girl whose long hair became caught in the machinery, decapitating her. Dahlia, our beloved MUSA president, took no chances; she hooded up.

At lunchtime, everyone headed to a certain meeting area, where Domino's pizzas imported all the way from Subang Jaya were then served to appease the 130 or so voracious appetites present. And once the food was downed, I hosted a game of charades. Each group had two actors plus three people guessing the names of movies. Nothing really special here, besides the usual hilarity that ensued when people had to act out Brokeback Mountain or American Pie (hint: both resulted in pseudo-shagging).

In between rounds, I made the time to join the guys for a round of Rasa Sayang singing.
(Note: In-joke)

Andrea loved the performance; here's her million dollar reaction.

When charades ended, a human scavenger hunt began. We (MUSA council members) sent them all over the outdoor theme park in search of us, while the remaining buddies led the groups around the place. It wasn't too hard for us to get caught in the beginning, but it started raining and the game was transferred to the First World Plaza, where there's always a flood of people; even more so as it was Chinese New Year. No interesting pictures here...

My group; half Malaysian, half Sri Lankan.

Finally, after all the games were completed and the prizes awarded (Borders book vouchers, yum!), the important parts of the Orientation Party was over. The three buses made their way down the mountain. I got stuck on the third bus, whose occupants were mostly so passive and asleep that I failed to rile them up even with a terrible rendition of Britney's Oops I Did It Again. A complete "What the hell?" moment. Boooooooring.

In bus number two, passengers slept at their own peril.

I guess that's it. This post was mostly to make up for the dearth of photos on this blog. My sincere apologies to those who expected something more profound. Not in such a philosophical mood today, especially since the goddamned Streamyx is giving me so much connection troubles that it took me three hours over the period of two nights to get everything uploaded onto Blogger! Bloody friggin' hell.

Zhen was here at 12:15 am,