Our little Merdeka madness

The Merdeka weekend before semester starts is particularly memorable. On the 30th, the whole of GFS went to Sungkai for the special water baptism outing. Since the Inti GFS folks are already there in campus, I drove down there with Maddie, Lerdie, Sophia and Alvin. We set off at 6.45am in fear of losing our way there and being late for the service. In the end, we were the earliest to arrive there as compared to the rest, and the bus came way too late an hour later. There were lots of people at the hot spring by the time we entered since it's a long holiday over the weekends. Busloads of tourists to be precise and a majority of them the elderly or children. There were quite a number of families too. It seems that we were also unfortunate on that day because the cool pools were not working and only the hot spring waters are functional.

Three people that I know in church are being baptised and they are Li Lian, Tze and Daniel. Congrats in passing through this rite of passage! I'm sure it will be one of the significant days that they'll remember in their lives. After the baptism service, we were free to go around to have fun in the water. The five of us went to soak our legs at the hot springs, pose around with the camera and then makan ice-cream. 2 scoops for RM2 is not too bad..haha. Afterthat we had lunch and then we headed back on our car ride. The initial plan was to get back to campus but we felt that it was a little wasted to return like that. So, we planned to make a detour to Mid-Valley for a little shopping trip since Sophia needed to get something there too. I had a look around and I was most interested to get some sushi to eat. I managed to get PC Gaming magazine too since the cover story is on The Old Republic. Lovely stuff they have in there..haha. After walking around till about 7, we needed to depart from there since Alvin needed to attend an important function at his church. So, we fetched him to PJ first before making our way down to Subang to see if there is anything nice to eat.

I was in the mood for some old nostalgia so I decided to stop at Subang Parade to have a look around and see how much it has changed for the past 9 years or so. It was truly a walk down memory lane for me over there. McDonalds and Kenny Rogers were still at the same place and so is Yamaha. The bridge-linking walkways was still there, only that instead of rough tiles, they are now white marbles. The foodcourt is gone though, to my dismay since they used to sell one of the best claypot chicken rice there. So we settled down to eat at one of those artificial old town cafes where lemak laksa set comes at RM11..lol. After we're done, we went back to campus to prepare for one of most craziest activities that we would ever do under the banner of ICF..haha.

At around 11.30pm, we gathered at the dining hall. Lol..Kylie and Lionel from Inti Subang came to join us since they were hanging out around Nilai and PD earlier. Lerdie planned to do a small "marchpast" around campus and since I have a collection of lagu patriotik/propaganda, I brought my Ipod down so that I can blast those songs with Maddie's Ipod speakers. In addition to that, we also have the little flags from the Mid-Valley As we "marched down", we played stuffs like Tanggal 31, Wawasan 2020 and Berjaya. We had a countdown at 12am and afterthat, we just pop up to people that we pass by and gave them sweets. As most Malaysians were not back yet then, most international students there were puzzled and we had to explain that it's independence day. We also went to the security guards and gave them the sweets. One of them even had her birthday on 31st itself and she said this is the first time she ever saw students celebrating Merdeka at campus. Lol..going around like this may be one of the most psycho thing to do but it's pretty heartening to see somebody smiling and get cheered up because of our silliness :)

After an hour or so going around, we went back after that. Well, this is probably the first and last time that we'll get to do this since more than half of us in the group won't be around campus in the next Merdeka celebration..haha. It was fun while it lasted :)