Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Whoo, long time since I last blogged seriously. Anyway, I'm just recounting what I did on the night of 31st December 2006-1st January 2007.

My mom had this wonderful idea of going to Marina Bay to watch the fireworks and feel the new year mood in the crowd so my whole family drove with her friend's family...and before we even reached, we got stuck in a traffic jam. The road was just cramped with one row of cars on one side, TWO rows of cars on the other side (mind you this road is one-direction only) and one slow line of cars crawling forward. On the right side of the road there was a loooong queue of people trying to cross the road >.< must have been hundreds/thousands of people just on that pedestrian walkway.

The police closed off the roads around the Esplanade so there was nowhere to park. We dropped off and went on foot to join the huge streams of people heading towards the bridge next to the Esplanade (dunno what's its name). The place was just completely filled with nothing but people and more people...and the population ratio was not proportionate...there were lots of foreigners there (i.e. Sri Lanka/Bangladesh workers). It's like, the most crowded place I've ever been in my whole life. Don't want to think what would happen if there was a stampede or terrorist attack or something. There was just no space to move, not to mention walking briskly.

Well the most wonderful thing happened there...due to some reason, the reception for handphones was jammed :\ and both of our families were separated from our dads (who drove the cars off to find somewhere to park)...so after calling 10000 times finally got through ONCE and talked for a very long time. Decided not to try to find each other as there were few thousands of people there...finding needle in a haystack? :p So we just decided to meet at the lobby of Raffles Hotel after the thing ended.

Nearing 12 midnight the loudspeaker came on and 2 unseen emcees started saying the usual new year stuff. They were saying "1 more minute to 2007!" and talking about the unexpected huge number of people who had turned up, and then the fireworks display just started. (meaning they got carried away and forgot to count down, which was the whole point of emceeing??) I guess the fireworks weren't too bad, but only lasted for 10 minutes when the newspapers promised 20-30minutes.

So everyone was greeting each other 'happy new year' and preparing to go home when the fireworks ended and suddenly the foreign workers started shouting and screeching and making noises. I don't want to say too much, just that they didn't sound very nice :( so we hurried off. We met up at Raffles Hotel after another 20min of navigating through the leaving crowd. The handphones finally worked then again when we were further from the place so it was easier to communicate with each other. After that we just went off to the new AMK Macs for a late supper :) before going back home near 3am.