Cedar Point

okkkkkkk. the silly wireless is finally up.

Eeks, my tagboard died. How come!!! Joel, help please… haha!

so much has happened in the last 5 days since we arrived, i dunno where to start. sitting at the employee recreation centre now. but i cant get into any other webpage except the SMU email and this page, so i might as well blog. heh.

work. work's been pretty boring. we just keep cleaning the food stands over and over again. AND THEY'RE CLEAN. those poor thais have been here for 3 weeks to a month, and they've cleaned the same stands like 5 times already, its really stupid. things took a turn for the better yesterday though. we went to work in the morning from 9 -11. we had international orientation in the afternon back at the housing area, which is like across the bridge from Cedar Point itself, and a horrible bus-ride away. the orientation was from 2.30 - 4, so we had some time to slack around and play frisbee. fun stuff man, at least it's exercise! haha. our supervisor, Jim, told us to call him after that to see if we needed to go down, so i did, and he said he wanted us back for cotton candy training. we really dragged our feet back, and they gave us a short briefing and said we could sign out. can u imagine that! we were fuming man!!! until........... Tony (Jim's boss) comes along and says tonight is Johnny Rocket's Night. So he packed us 4 by 4 in his rickety old car which was full of rubbish.

Johnny Rocket's is phenomenal man. It's set retro style, and the servers sing at dance every 20 mins. most of them at afro-americans and they're quite good. they gave us a dime each to slot into the music machine and choose songs. There was this girl who sang the American National Anthem in a really powerful voice at the beginning and the end. Talk about patriotism. The food was really really good, but the thing was that we honestly couldnt believe that we could order anything we liked for FREE. my goodness, we asked our server like 3 times or something. i had a cookies and cream milkshake, onion rings as starters, a double beef patty burger with extra mushrooms, and there was no space for dessert. My 'bill' was quite cheap- like $17.55. other tables 'spent' like $70 for a table of 4! crazy! we relly couldnt walk after that. well, the servers and cooks had to practice anyway, so i complicated the order with extra mushrooms haha. that really changed the day man. we really didnt mind coming all the way back for 'work'. and u know what. all the training sessions, and this dinner thing, was PAID TIME. hahahahahaha. madness.

we went home contented, full and very happy last night. and we slept soundly too. but before that, i spent the night consolidating all the pictures we took in NYC and DC. 6 of us combined had a collection of photos and videos that was 4.99Gb.. sheesh. cant even burn into a DVD la.

thats not all. today, we dragged ourselves to work again. Woke up at like 7.25am (though the alarm rang at 7.15am, as usual. haha) we packed bread, apple and salad for lunch. Rushed for the bus as usual and went for foods training at 9am. It was just a classroom session where they talk about safety and cleanliness for 2 hours, then we take a test. Owellz. Like I said, it’s paid time, so I really didn’t mind.

Reported back for work and walked around a bit doing nothing, until we found out that we were getting free lunch at TGI Fridays on the beach. This is a more expensive restaurant cos they served ribs and steak. The drinks weren’t very nice though, the iced tea had no taste, so I got a strawberry shake, which was really an ice smoothie. Heh. And they didn’t really allow us to order anything we wanted – only 1 appetizer, 1 entrée from different pages of the menu each, and 2 deserts to share. Sat with Josh from OH, and 2 Thai guys, Utt and Nick cos I refused to stick with the Singaporean guys. But the ribs were huge, and the food was quite good. Well, free food is always good. We didn’t get the bill this time, think we were in such a hurry to leave to get back to work. We sat there for a good 2 hours I think! Other tables had bills coming up to $90 bucks. Owellz. The perks of working at the foods department. Oh, in the end we got a dessert each which we packed cos we were way too full. I got a brownie obsession, which melted in the sun while we were hard at work in the afternoon. Owellz. Ill eat it later anyway, as dinner, since im still so full.

After lunch we finally learned to spin cotton candy. I dun want to spin cotton candy though, its such a messy job, but I think I did it too well when I tried, crap. Should have anyhow done it so they’ll let me do dippin’ dots, which is ice-cream and much cleaner. Sigh. And one cotton candy is like 25cents. Sheesh. Volunteered for more work after that cos it was only 3pm. So we got sent to clean more stuff. Dang. I really understand how poor david felt in army last time. Heh. Cleaning stuff that was just cleaned the day before! Finished at 5.15pm, though we wanted to catch the 5.15 bus back, but we were running around looking for the supervisors to sign out, that we found ourselves running (read: sprinting) for the 5.45pm bus. Sigh, they’re so so so inefficient here.

Cant wait for Saturday though, when the parks open. The rides are awesome. They have been left running for the past 2 days so we keep hearing and seeing the power roller coasters in action. Cant wait, though ill prolly freak out when I get to the front of the queue. Millennium force looked really exciting, super high speed, and super long, dunno the exact details, will let u all know when I finally ride it. Heh. The top-thrill dragster looked really scary man. They shoot u from 0km/hr to 190km/hr in 6 seconds, and they up this super high, vertical thing (its like the tallest in the world). If the car doesn’t pick up enough speed, it’ll fall back down, but if it does, you’ll go over, and come down vertically again (and I mean 90 degrees down), and the track is twisted. Heh. Freaky. And the ride is over in 30 seconds. Waiting for the employee ride nights for those so I dun have to queue. Today was the ferris wheel ride night, didn’t go. Wanted to go for the go-kart one the other day, but was working, and I heard that the go-karts kept breaking down anyway.

Ok im blogging way too much. Really need to get a car man, waiting for the bus is super inconvenient. And this place is totally inaccessible without a car. The first day, the bunch of us Singaporeans tried walking down to the nearest shops and it was crazily far we gave up halfway. And no one else was walking, there was no pedestrian path anyway! Our international orientation trainer warned us not to walk on the streets at night, cos pple will immediately know you’re not local and will mug us, cos locals dun walk. Haha. Josh said that he’ll help us get a car though, will arrange a date and get one of the guys to go with him to the used car dealer. Supposed to be like $500+, better than we expected..

Okok I better stop, take care everyone, I hope the tagboard recovers soon. Heh. I haven’t checked it since I was in DC a week ago!


charles, me, ambrose, nick, esmond, yong chang, debbie and gabe (the photographer)


Sharon: don’t worry about your play. It’s just one game, and everyone has bad days, sir understands. Just train hard and give your best ok… love you! Cant get to the singtel page so I cant msg anyone!