1st to 4th May - YKLS Singapore Trip
Alright, so I'm finally going to blog a little about the Singapore trip. I don't want this to become an epic-lengthed blog post like the China one I did at the beginning of the year, so I'll just stick to the more interesting bits of the trip.

Day 1 - Thursday, 1st May
We met up at YCA (that's the Young Choral Academy) in TTDI (Taman Tun Dr. Ismail) at 9am, and a surprising number of people were punctual. Ryonn, who organised the trip, unveiled to us the rather cheesy looking (must be the colour) banner for the trip.


Right before leaving, I had to make a trip to 7-Eleven to buy a six-pack of three-ply Winnie the Pooh tissues to deal with my occasional morning sinusitis and runny nose. Unfortunately, about two hours later I realised that my nose was on a marathon, and that it was a full-fledged cold... A theme which would pervade throughout the trip.


We made a pit stop at Yong Peng, Johor, as is typical of bus rides down to Singapore. Yong Peng... Where right above urinals, you have advertisements asking you to buy "Rox", a herbal supplement to cure haemorrhoids. A lot of people will know what I mean; most of the stops here have the ubiquitous sign.


After six hours or so of travelling, we finally made it to the Katong Hostel, our quarters for the next three nights. The place was quite alright, although I thought that its architecture was an appalling waste of space in land-scarce Singapore.


At night, we took up a multi-purpose room to practice for our upcoming exchanges and performances. My nose was still on the run.


By the end of the day the six-pack of tissues had been completely used up. I went to bed under the influence of pseudoephedrine and Vitamin C.

Day 2 - Friday, 2nd May
Still sick from the cold. We had our breakfast at a nearby food centre before leaving for Esplanade, our first activity for the day.



We were given a guided tour around the performing arts venue, marvelling at the architectural wonder that is the building. Huge theatres, wonderful acoustics, etc... Stuff that makes blogging about them difficult. So I won't. Instead, I'll show you more pictures with the cheesy banner:



And then we went sightseeing around the building. There's a shop that sold Nasi Lemak flavoured cookies (expensive, but it does taste like Nasi Lemak!), a shop that lets you personalise your own teddy, as well as a shop that sold these babies:



And then we went to LaSalle College of the Arts for a tour of the campus. The idea was to expose the younger ones of us to the possibility of pursuing arts and performance seriously in the region, completely contrary to what our pragmatic parents would normally tell us: "Get a real degree and get a real job!", they'd say.





The evening was almost upon us when our tour ended, giving us about three to four hours before our next activity. Carrie being Carrie and me being the dutiful boyfriend, we spent that time shopping in Orchard Road. By we I mean Carrie (sorry dear, but it's true! Heh heh). That's when we discovered Anything and Whatever that I put up in the previous post's Pointless Fact of the Day.

After that, we headed back to the hostel to grab the bus to meet up with the Singapore Men's Chorus. They're a bunch of fun-loving and friendly guys. In my opinion, this was the highlight of the trip, especially since they sang a bunch of really good and really funny songs; Ji Lang Ji Pua, anyone?






And that marked the end of day two of the trip. I still had my cold and runny nose, though. To make things worse, Carrie was falling sick too; people tell me that it was my fault. Bah!

Day 3 - Saturday, 3rd May (no kidding)
Still sick (what else is new?) but by now, so were Tracy and Alvin (somewhat). Everyone were beginning to fall like flies! It didn't help that the very next choir exchange we had was a major one, with the choirs of Nelson Kwei and Zechariah Goh (Victoria Junior College and Meridien Junior College choirs respectively) , both known to be very good at what they do. Hell, I knew how good they were because I used to sing in a Singaporean choir. We met them at a community centre.

Unfortunately, YKLS did not deliver. I'll leave my rant about this to the end of the post so as to not ruin the mood of the post thus far.




We had our lunch nearby somewhere a distance away, forcing us to walk in the searing afternoon sun. It helped alleviate my marathoning nose problem, but the constant alternating between really hot and really cold environments isn't good for your overall health.

Anyway, after lunch we had one final stop on our itinerary; the Acapella Society. It's a group of youths that come together to sing. First up, we had an amusing hour-long lesson on beatboxing by Ryan, a JC student.


Then, we got them to sing. They're a real acapella group, i.e. their sound leaned more towards Boyz II Men than towards the Vienna Boys. Really nice song arrangements, too.





And that was the end of the trip's itinerary. We were free for the rest of the day, so I took this time out to meet up with old choirmates from my time in Saint Andrew's Junior College. I couldn't contact a lot of them in time, so only Jee Cheng, Yang Hong and Hana made it for the little reunion. Haven't seen them in two years, in fact.

We met up at Miss Clarity, a place I had rather fond memories of. Pardon the gaudiness of the place; that was its charm!



My only regret was that I couldn't round up more of them in time. But oh well, you settle for what you can get. After that, we went walking around Orchard Road for a bit before bidding our goodbyes once again.

Carrie and a few others were allocated a room that had a common area with a television, so the both of us watched Shark Tale on TV3 late into the night. The homosexual undertones was rife in the movie, seriously.

Anyway, as I went to bed, Tracy's sickness has gone worse, and Nick (her boyfriend) has started falling sick too. Man, this bug is spreading real fast.

Day 4 - Sunday, 4th May
What's there to blog about? We left the place in the morning, and arrived home in the evening. Overall, the trip was a great experience, and definitely an eye-opener for a lot of the new members. In my case, I just tried to have fun the best I could, despite my nostrils insisting on spoiling the effort.

Oh, by Tuesday I discovered that almost 10 out of the 30 or so people who went down to Singapore had fallen sick, most with the same symptoms of runny noses and fever, Carrie included. It really sucks to know that you have unintentionally subjected your girlfriend to two weeks of illness (it took her that long to recover, poor girl), but what can you do?

Especially since she refuses to see doctors. Bleargh. Anyway, that's all for my Singapore trip. There'll be more of these kinda blog posts coming up; I'm planning an MNSM trip to Cameron Highlands after the exams, so rest assured that there'll be no dearth of interesting nonsense to read in July.

Speaking of exams, mine's starting on the 9th of June, leaving slightly over two more weeks to study. Yikes!

Pointless Fact of the Day:
Jimmy Kimmel is the host of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, his very own talk show, where at the end of the show, he would usually say "Apologies to Matt Damon; we've run out of time." As a joke, his girlfriend Sarah Silverman (probably America's most famous female stand-up comedian) appeared on his show one fine day early this year and announced that she was "Fucking Matt Damon". Take a look at hilarity:



A month later, Jimmy Kimmel retaliated by enlisting the help of his fellow star friends. Even more hilarity:



Personally, I find Sarah's song to be the catchier of the two... But you just can't fight with "He's got bigger tits"!

Finally, the rant:
You know how people like to hide behind the cover of their blogs and rant in the hopes of the people they're criticising see what they wrote just so they can avoid a face-to-face confrontation? This rant is something like that (until one day when I'm justifiably irritated enough to make this comment).

Our performance in front of the other two choirs was nothing short of embarrassing, in my opinion. However, when it comes to choral singing, success and failure depends on group effort... We simply just weren't as hardworking as the Singaporean choirs.

But what pisses me off was when people from our choir suggested that "Singaporean choirs don't know how to have fun when they sing." Fuck that! When I was in the SAJC Choir, I had the time of my life! Even a friend of mine who used to be under Nelson Kwei can say the same. YKLS's problem is that a lot of the new members this year just don't see how much effort it takes to become that good. In SAJC, we used to practice anywhere between two to five hours every day for two weeks straight just to get prepared for our concert and SYF. In YKLS, two hours plus and you already have people complaining.

I understand that the situation's different. It's the defeatist attitude that we have that's hurting our progress. I felt so embarrassed when Susanna pointed that out to us when we were in the holding room, because it aptly described the state of our choir. When we see the Singaporeans doing better than us, we come up with silly excuses like "They don't know how to have fun".

Granted, "They're students" is a valid reason, since we have many working adults in our choir, but take a look at people like Sherry and Joel and Wai Fun and Tracy dan lain-lain who are just as busy but still make the effort to at least learn up their parts before coming for Monday practices. Hell, I'm a student but I'm also busy with my club and student council and all that jazz, and I still screw my singing parts up quite often, but at least I make an effort to get better! Carrie's notating the song parts all nicely done in Midi and Mitchell's disseminating it to everyone, is an hour a week of learning on your own too much to ask?

This begs the question: Did we learn anything from the trip at all?

I think that there's a message that needs to be driven home into the minds of some of the newer additions to the choir (the old ones are alright, most of them already understand). YKLS isn't a vacation. It's a commitment. People who don't seem to make even the slightest effort to improve themselves should really invite themselves out.

Damn it feels good to get that off my chest. And to think that all this started because someone (I forgot who) said "Singaporean choirs don't know how to have fun when they sing."

I'm back from Singapore and back to classes again. It's terrible how a long weekend spent in another country makes one forget that it isn't the holidays yet. On an unrelated note, I was sick throughout the entire trip; I spent about RM5 worth of tissues throughout the trip, half of which were used on the first day! Almost ten other people fell sick after the trip too, rousing suspicions of an epidemic of some sort.

Anyway, while I wait for photos of the Singapore trip to trickle in, I'll be blogging about the Monash Street Carnival first.

26th April 2008 - Monash Street Carnival
First of all, (almost) every club was assigned the task of preparing a booth for the Street Carnival. Being the resident Nature Society and all, we decided to come up with a recyclable-themed booth; a recycled dart game made out of old newspaper and nails! And sell J.Co donuts (how original), too...

I had to be in Monash early to set up the booth, so I swung by McDonald's first to get myself some breakfast. I used the vouchers for free Sausage McMuffins that Darren/Peck Yun gave us earlier that month (he got them from the magazine, MYC):


I planned to get five and give four to those who were helping out that day, so imagine my surprise when the cashier told me that they ran out of Sausage McMuffins and if Fillet-O-Fish(es) are okay.


Why the hell not?

And then we got working on the board; Leanne, Thasha, Sriram, Shanq Yeet and I. It took us almost four hours to get everything up and running because half the time, it was only Leanne and I doing the work as the rest were busy with other things. We were done by around 1pm.



Because it was a long day and there were so many booths at the carnival, I'll just skip to the fun bits. First of all, it was themed "Wet and Wild", with a section specially designated for playing with water...:



...an inflatable gladiator arena...:


...and a mechanical bull:


And there was also this Carl's Junior burger eating contest that I totally sucked at (shoulda just ate the burgers slowly and enjoy every bite):


And then there were performances! A whole slew of them, and everyone came to watch. Quite a good turnout too, almost three times the size of last year's crowd.





The highlight of the night was the guest performances, of course. First up: Ben's Bitches! Can you spot the groupies?



DragonRed and Bus Company performed too, but I wasn't really a fan of their music, so I was already ready to close down the booth and call it a day... But not before camwhoring one last time.


When I got home, it was already 2am. Imagine spending 17 hours in uni, outdoors, and without showering; now you know how glad I was when I finally went to bed.

And I'm spent. Normally I'm much more verbose than this, but I really need to get to doing my work.

Pointless Fact of the Day:
Do you know of Snopes.com? It's a super useful website for determining the truth (or more commonly, lack thereof) of an urban legend. Seriously, could you guys (I'm not naming names) research these things before forwarding them to my e-mail? Bloody spammers. I just received this today:

Recently a woman in Taiwan suddenly died of blood flowing from her every orifice. Lab test result shows it was due to the deceased having taken vitamin C after eating a lot of shrimps. Shrimps contain an ingredient when combined with vitamin C in human body, can generate a kind of poisonous substance like white arsenic which is fatal to the body.

Please tell everybody & those you care not to take vitamin C after eating seafood!

A quick search told me that this is not true, as well as the reasons why. Everyone should start visiting Snopes more often before telling me about HIV needles at petrol stations and telling me to forward e-mail so that Bill Gates will pay me.

Idiots.