Ah, the long-awaited first post of 2008. After much delightful merrymaking and fun, the two month long holiday, probably our last real holiday, has come to an eventful close.

I spent the last day of 2007 at the boon lay countdown, a.k.a senior citizens' countdown, since many of the planned activities were for small kids and senior citizens. Went to the boon lay community club with wentao in the afternoon, all ready to do our part as volunteers for the countdown, organized in part by boon lay youth club. Anyway, found that the community club were actually a stone's throw away from my old house. I was quite shocked to discover the changes that happened to my old neighbourhood, like the old public pool. I was saying something like, "Hey look, there's a nice swimming pool there!" Then discovered that the swimming pool has been razed and is now an empty field. My old house is also painted differently as compared to 5 years ago.

Anyway, after much strolling around and general lazing, since we were quite early and did not know what to do, we finally discovered that we were supposed to be in charge of a funfair booth from 7pm-9pm. Hmm...so we actually came 3 hours early ostensibly to do some random saigang(mostly blowing balloons and carrying barricades), which we found out were all taken care of by the bountiful numbers of boon lay youth club members and the hardcore enthu canoeists like kennedy, jrem, and michael. So after 2 hours of pointless wandering about, we found ourselves assigned to one of the two funfair booths. Basically, customers were supposed to throw a mini basketball at a mini hoop, the infamous magic hoop for New Boom Action(NBA). Anyway, the hoop turned out to be in a much dilapidated condition, the original hoop to all appearances busted and replaced with a wooden hoop with a pathetic diameter(means that basically there is a very small chance of scoring). So in the end, me, zhanming, and wentao were in charge of the booth, while ivan, another guy, and some girls were in charge of the other booth which had another retarded game(didn't bother finding out what it was).

The first 20 minutes basically involved zhanming bullying a small boy, by giving him as many shots at the hoop as possible. Well, expectedly the small boy turned out to be rather hopeless and zhanming started to suan him about his lousy skills at basketball. For example, he will say, "哎呀，你怎么那么烂的！看我来教你！" and promptly dunks the mini-ball from a distance of about 50cm away from the hoop. To which the small boy will retort indignantly and a comic argument will follow. It was entertainment for the boring hot afternoon, albeit poor at that...To pass the time and satisfy his hunger, wentao also bought one of those nice oily ramly burgers. To our shock, we witnessed the burger-chef pouring ample portions of barbecue, mayonnaise, and chilli sauce over the chicken patty. Later, while he was eating the burger, the sauce actually dripped out in large disgusting globules onto the burger box. -_-

Business only started to bustle in the evening, when we were starting to feel more entertained with kovan slacking around our booth waiting for his guitar performance at night and the timely arrival of junwei who came at around 7. By then, due to the large number of people and the attractiveness of the dumb activity of having 5 free throws at the hoop and a tiny chance to win 2-year old kids' toys like slinkies, bubble-blowers, and yoyos, we had a humongous queue and we found ourselves hard-pressed explaining the rules and picking up the errant balls. We were finally relieved of our duty at 9pm by the next shift people and went back to the community club to slack. After slacking for 2 hours or so, kovan finally summoned the energy to get off his bum and we walked around the by-now super crowded boon lay place and patronised some stalls for snacks and drink. Then we went to the boon lay youth club, which was a well furnished first floor apartment complete with sofa, tv set and a gym machine. so nice. After slacking there for a while, we went to the main stage to watch the countdown. There were actually some celebs like Kim Ng who hosted for the countdown at boon lay. So, the new year began with a bang in the form of some nice fireworks which were really really close to us!! Pieces of the firework actually rained down on us, and there were complaints of stuff getting into eyes. Finally, after a mad rush to the lakeside mrt station, we managed to catch a train, and all was well.