Inti Carnival

Alright, time to take a break from Stan's coverage of Euro 2008 and now put some attention on the happenings in his life..lol. Last weekend was really crazy as Vincent and me implemented this crazy plan to be able to watch the Nederland match and at the same time be able to go for the charity run on Saturday. We slept early at 9 pm and woke up in the wee hours of 2am. Then we proceeded to the mamak stall to book a nice place to watch the match. After the entertaining match, which is at about 4 am plus or so, we went back to shower and then come out later again for the run. No sleeping as we step onto the 5km starting line.

Of course, the runs brought back some memories of cross country at Macritchie Reservoir and 2.4km runs at the track. I stick to the tactic I always use, maintaining speed and dashing when it's going downhill. Well, me and Vincent thought that we were going so fast that we were going to at least get some medals in the 40s position. But hell no, the guys in the 5km run are maniacs and by the time we reach there, we only manage to get the certificate as the all the medals have been snapped up already. In order to get the certificate, runners were given 45 minutes maximum to complete the 5km run. We finished ours in 28 minutes. We looked over the girls side and they easily have like 40+ medals left. In fact, only the first two girls beat our timing. The third one is at 29 minutes. I joked with Vincent if we had a sex change the night before, we would have gotten something..lol.

Afterthat we went and jalan around the carnival stalls. Christian fellowship had a booth selling pizzas and we bought half box of it. Nice to see them getting good sales too :) There was also a rock band performing at the pool side, mat rockers to be precise. I saw them performing at the music room at one of the nights. The instrumentals (drums, electric and bass) were very good but I think the vocalist need some improvement though. They performed two songs, Muse's "time is running out" and Red hot chili pepper's "by the way". Muse's song definitely not easy to perform cos the vocalist really need to match up with Matt Bellamy's high pitched soprano voice and don't sound like an "ah kua" at the same time. The sad thing is that not many people were there to rock out with the band. Firstly, the venue for the performance is so hidden and obscure. They would have more audience if they played in the hall or near the carnival stalls. Secondly, in this part of the world, not many know how to appreciate the spirit and talent of rock. Many of them are just so preoccupied with the cheap marketing nature of pop music, R&B and rap/hip hop music. Most Southeast Asian Chinese idea of music is Jay Chou, Lee Hom or one of those heavily marketed westernised R&B/pop flavour of the month. Not many of them would have known about guitar solos/starting rifts, some creative drumming beats/rolls or the intriguing plucking of the bass guitar. Ahh, I'm getting carried away on the topic of music..lol..maybe I'll do a historical research paper in the future on the "Musical Preference of Southeast Asian Chinese"..haha.

Besides the band at the pool, there's an interesting "ride" where two fellas will pay to enter an inflated giant balloon and attempt to move across the swimming pool using that. Quite funny looking at the methods that some of them use. Overall, I had quite a good dose of fun at the carnival. By 1pm or so, I was feeling really exhausted and immediately crashed to the bed and dozed off.

Speaking of tonight, it's gonna be a morning of high tension as I watch whether Deutschland would qualify for the quarters.