I received a sms at like 6am in the morning. Jun Wei’s in China, again.

Didn’t reply him until I was out of the house and walking to work and when he called me I was at Citi Tower (beside the hotel) and he told me he was at Pearl Tower (at the other side of the hotel). Too bad I couldn’t meet him to get my stuff because his tour bus was leaving already. I gotta wait for another 6 days or something until I can get the stuff I asked my mum to pack from Singapore!

From today onwards, the people in our dept told YJ and I to split the work. So, I’m currently doing all the GDS bookings and YJ’s doing all the call arrivals.

I was bombarded with 65 GDS bookings in the morning and I faced the computer the whole day imputing all the data into Opera.

Soon enough it was lunch and finally after a long time the canteen food was NICE! We had minced meat noodles, fried chicken wings and sweet and sour pork (:

We tried to go to the general cashier to get our pay but when we went there, it was at 3.30pm :(

So we went up again and I thought I was free already because I finished all the 65 bookings but I was given another 25 bookings to do again!

After completing the next 25 bookings it was 3.30pm so we went down to the general cashier to get our pay. There was a queue there and we started queuing!!

It kinda sucked because we knew some of the people in the queue as well and we didn’t want them to know how much we were taking. Because it’s the first time we’re getting our pay, it’ll be in cash and for RMB, the biggest note is RMB100.

So imagine us getting RMB6000; that’s like 60 RMB100 notes which is quite thick!

And the stupid cashier has this machine to count the money and this BQT staff that was behind us was trying so hard to see how much we got and I think he saw.

Its not that we don’t want anyone to know how much we’re getting, but it’s not very nice because our pay is considered damn high here.

So after our pay we went to print out the reports and went up again. Having nothing to do when I went up I started surfing the internet and play games until I was given another 20 GDS bookings to do.

I had only 45mins left so I quickly did it to leave work on time! We headed over to Lotus to look for Joanne and Angela cuz they ended work at like 4.30pm.

We did grocery shopping!! :D :D Bought fruits, yoghurt, junk, etc. Cabbed home after that.

The most random thing happened when we came home. We were packing our newly bought groceries and suddenly we realized that the Soya Bean Milk in the fridge was leaking and dripped onto the floor. And then we started to say “omg the house is so dirty, let’s clean it!”

And yes, we started off with the kitchen area because of the spilt milk, then I went to wash the toilet that was filled with hair, YJ and Angela swept the floor and mopped the room and Joanne mopped the kitchen area.

There was hair all over and we took quite some time to clean it and waited for the floor to dry.

Watched “Shop Girl” for awhile and I cooked Maggie Mee for dinner. The show was quite boring and we stopped watching it after half an hour. And since all of us had already gotten our pay, we settled money (:

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I want to come back skinnier! HOW. OMG. But you said I didn't gain weight. So hopefully I'd remain the same OR become skinnier in like 3 months! HAHAHA.

Work started at 9am as usual. We thought that we could take our pay today because it’s 30 Oct but when we went down to the general cashier, the person said that it’s either tomorrow or when the notice is up :(

So much for being so hyped up getting RMB6000 at one shot. Sigh. We still gotta wait.

When I was doing the arrival calls today, I had to call someone from Hong Kong. And then I found out how to make overseas calls so I tried to call my dad. And it worked!!

So I was like calling my dad, 2 aunts, mum, Lance, Jun Wei, Nadia, my ah ma and chatted with them (: The good thing is that I don’t have to pay a single cent because I’m using the hotel’s phone but I don’t know if they need to pay or not.

We also did shop calls to ask if they had any Christmas promotions and also keyed in all the GDS bookings.

Hubert said he wanted to meet all 7 of us at Yi Café at 4pm so we went down. We chatted for almost an hour about what we’ve learnt so far. He’s really concerned and wants us to make the most out of our stay here.

After work, we met Joanne and Angela because they ended work an hour earlier than us. Joanne was going to meet her aunt for dinner so all 3 of us went along too.

We headed down to Ba Bai Ban to meet them before walking to another building to eat steamboat. The food there wasn’t that bad but it wasn’t filling.

There were very minimal road side stalls today and because we were still hungry we headed over to KFC and I ordered an egg tart (:

We then went opposite our house to buy ice-cream to eat in the cold weather and then Joanne and I sat down to eat Shao Kao.

Hopefully we’re able to get our pay tomorrow. I so want that amount of money badly.

It’s the normal routine again.

YJ and I finally managed to reach work ON TIME (:

We were thrown to do arrival callings, shop callings and GDS bookings for the whole damn day.

There wasn’t much to call so we sort of slacked a bit by using the internet. All we did was surf friendster, read blogs, check emails, played tetris and bejeweled.

It was damn funny when either of us would pop up of our cubical and peep over to go “eh, what you doing huh?” and started laughing so loudly when we see each other playing games or doing anything else except Opera and Lotus.

We also lunched early at 11.30am today because we didn’t have much breakfast. Disgusted by canteen food, we decided to go over to Super Brand Mall without knowing what to eat. In the end we settled for Macs.

Nearing the end of the day, we had to go down to level 1 (where the rubbish area is) and head to some engineering room to print out reports. I hate the place because it’s super smelly!

We had to print 4 days worth of reports because we didn’t get Thursday and Friday’s one printed out + the weekends.

Headed back upstairs to slowly count figures for another report and I heard that someone was looking for me over the phone. I thought it was some guest or something so I pretended I didn’t hear them calling my name but in the end they transferred the call over to me :(

And no, it wasn’t any guest but our dear assistant director of F&B; Goh.

“Hello, Kim ah. What time you guys knock off today? Can come help me with some stuff?”

“Actually, we’ve got nothing much to do already so we’ll just tell Nancy you’re looking for us and we leave now okay?”

“Okay, see you later at BQT office.”

I had no clue what he wanted us to help him with but it was good that we got to leave half an hour earlier because we really had nothing to do. Even if we stayed, we’ll end up playing online games for another half an hour.

In the end, Goh wanted us to help him reply email (s). He told us what he wanted to reply and we had to go up to Yi Café to take measurements of a coffee machine -.-

We took like one and a half hours helping him reply the email. It doesn’t sound as crazy as it seems because he took time explaining to us what to reply, we went up to measure the coffee machine, went down to type the email, waited for him to come back and check, spent more time discussing what else to include, editing the email and attachment and finally sending it to the EAM of F&B.

And you know what, we could clock in this extra one and a half hours as OT! :D Goh even agreed to treat YJ and I to Yi Café someday because we helped him. Hahaha.

YJ and I were starving by the time we finished but the canteen food sucked today we didn’t even wanna eat there after looking at the food. We were deciding where to eat and almost settled on Subway but the only problem was that they didn’t have any seats!

So, we decided to go to Super Brand Mall again (minimum walking distance out in the cold) to eat (without knowing what we wanted).

In the end, we settled for Korean food! 1 Bibibap meal (miso soup + salad + fruits) cost us RMB30. C-H-E-A-P.

We both had a meal each and were super full after that because we finished everything on our plates!

Our initial plan was to drag time until 8.30pm to take the last shuttle bus home because we weren’t dressed very well for the cold weather (I was in flip flops and YJ didn’t bring her jacket).

But in the end, we ate until 8.45pm and decided to take a very slow walk home to digest the food and we reached home at 9.30pm!

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KC: I'm working very hard too!! I'm clocking in OT you know :P

For the first time in Shanghai, I woke up when the sky was still dark. I was up at 5.30am and after bathing the sky was bright already.

Ehui asked YJ and I to report to work at 7am today because there was a full day event going on- IBLAC (International Business Leaders Advisory Council) for the Mayor of Shanghai.

There was a seminar going on at China Hall in the morning and the set-up was way cool- round table in the middle and classroom at all the sides.

Having nothing much to do while waiting for the conference to start, Johnny asked us to go down to eat breakfast (:

Oh, guess who we saw at the conference today. Sun Yat-sen’s granddaughter- Nora Sun.

There were so many rich people today, all the CEO’s of companies were at the conference and almost 90% were male. But I find it funny that they separated the China companies and overseas companies seating arrangement- each took a different side.

We couldn’t stay inside when the conference took place so we stood outside the foyer waiting for their coffee break. When they were out, we went to refresh the room by changing all the opened Evian bottles to new ones.

After that we went out and helped the BQT staff clear coffee cups and all but we didn’t have any tray! So we could just take like 2 cups at one time which made us quite useless.

The meeting continued again and YJ and I walked around to the Grand Ball room to see the set-up of the buffet lunch they were going to have.

With nothing much to do already, we made our way down to BQT office to help them do up the dinner menu’s for their farewell dinner tonight. We also started teaching Tracy how to speak Hokkien while she taught us how to speak Shanghainese.

Turns out that Ehui, Goh and Kelvin had already been teaching her all the vulgarities and she used them without knowing how rough it sounded! We were all laughing so loudly when we were trying to speak each other’s languages because the pronunciation will always be wrong somewhere.

We met Goh on the way and he asked if we wanted to join them (Ehui, Cherry and Goh) for lunch at Super Brand Mall’s Burger King. We said okay and he said he’ll call us so we went down to BQT office to rest.

Waited and waited and we were freaking hungry because all I ate for breakfast was 2 eggs and 1 sausage. Called up Goh and he said they’ll be done in 15 mins. But after more than half an hour they still didn’t call so YH called him and he said they were already at BK and asked what we wanted to eat. Having heard that, we assumed that they’ll take away for us and bring it back to the hotel so we continued helping Niki and Dora do up the menu’s for tonight.

After another 15mins, Goh called again asking where we were. In the end, it was a miscommunication and Goh actually meant that they helped us buy food first so we didn’t have to order it when we came over.

By the time we got there, our fries were already cold :( They waited for us to finish eating and then we went back together.

YJ and I were walking from Grand Ballroom to China Hall to and fro because we didn’t have anything to do.

In the end, we decided to go down to BQT office to rest and we slept in the meeting room for like 20mins before helping them do up the menus again.

Headed up to China Hall 2 hours before the cocktail reception and dinner because there was a roll call. It wasn’t such a big ass event as compared to Opera Night and Singapore Evening so we weren’t assigned to do anything.

To make ourselves useful, we helped them place the menus on the table, arrange the chairs neatly etc etc prior to the event.

When the cocktail reception started, we went to the bar to help them pour drinks and also walked around (without a tray again) to help clear rubbish.

The air was horrendous today though- hazy like nobody’s business. You could even smell burnt smell when you’re outside. YJ and I wanted to see how cold it was so we went outside the foyer.

The wind was so strong that it blew off a glass of water and it flew right onto the floor and broke into bits.

It was cold, windy, smelly and hazy so there was no point staying outdoors. Soon enough, the bell rang indicating that it was time to be seated for the dinner.

They had Chinese set dinner today. We didn’t have any tasks assigned to us so we just walked around everywhere pouring red wine. It was much easier than the previous 2 events because there was only 1 type of red wine tonight and there wasn’t a need to pour different wines for different dishes.

Although there was also white wine, many guests didn’t request for it so it made our job easier.

The dinner was quite boring, because there weren’t any performances :( We had to continuously top-up red wine because they are forever toasting to whoever and whoever.

I met some rude guests too while pouring wine. There was this young guy (seems like that whole group of people are students) and when I was pouring wine for the girl beside him, he happily tapped my arm a few times indicating to me to stop pouring the wine -.-

And there was another Chinese guest, the moment I started pouring the wine, he was like “enough enough enough” (in Chinese). Whoa rude can!

There wasn’t really a sequence to serving and clearing dishes today so YJ and I helped out. After topping up all the wine, we’d occasionally walk around helping the BQT staff clear plates so that they could give them their new dish.

And yet again, we didn’t have any trays!

The whole night, we were walking around non-stop pouring wine, serving food and clearing plates.

My feet hurt so bad now!

The whole dinner ended at around 8.30pm and the BQT staff led us to somewhere to secretly eat food! There were so many plates of untouched food because some tables were empty!

We ate fruits, beef, glutinous rice and coffee cheesecake (: The poor BQT staff ate more because they didn’t have time to eat lunch and dinner. They ended work at like 4am last night and reported to work at 5.30am this morning. Madness.

Right, so anws there was a debrief after the whole thing and after that they had to tear down and set-up for another event. We helped them clear the tables and kept the seat covers before leaving.

Overall, we worked 14 hours today. This is MADNESS. But hey, we get to take off from RSVN next time so it means less hours in the office!

Walked home and omg my feet seriously hurt like hell. Although I was not hungry, I just felt like eating Shao Kao so I bought it before going upstairs.

YJ and I still wanted to watch a movie but after 10 mins of turning the TV on, we got sleepy.

Work tomorrow at 9am again. Oh what boring routines we get when we work in the office :(

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KC: Ditto to you!

I woke up at 1pm today (:

And by the time I bathed it was already 2pm and I was super hungry.

Jie Ying and I headed downstairs to eat at Lan Zhou and we walked to Jia De Li to buy some stuff.

After that, I rotted the whole day at home using the computer and typing some stuff.

I couldn’t watch any DVDs because our dear YJ has been hogging the TV watching her HK serial from like 9am to 8.30pm NON-STOP.

After that we switched to movies! Watched “Prey” and “Mini’s First Time”. Then YJ and I went downstairs to buy shao kao and came up and watched “Norbit” :D

Shortest blog entry ever man! Gotta reach work at 7am tomorrow though.

YJ and I decided to report to work at 9am today because we wanted to clock in more OT hours.

All we did the whole morning was more arrival calling. We were quite free because there weren’t much to call so we surfed the net :P

Ehui asked us to report at 2pm because there was going to be a roll-call for Singapore Evening but Nancy didn’t let us go. She had already planned to give Patrick, YJ and I training in the afternoon.

The training started at around 2pm where Lily taught us how to key in reservations, change and cancellation from the GDS booking system. This meant that we had to use more of Opera.

We ended at around 4.30pm but Angeline still asked us to check emails and go downstairs to print reports. Thank goodness there wasn’t anyone at level 1 so Nancy said we could go off first.

We bumped into Ehui outside China Hall and everyone was super busy. There were so many Singaporean’s there!!

We were tasked to be drink servers again and were assigned to different areas in the hall.

Before the event, there was registration and a cocktail reception. We hanged around the foyer and met so many Singaporeans. A lot of the ushers were exchange students and we started chatting with them. I swear the world is so small; one of the usher’s is Jun Wei’s friend.

We also saw quite a few famous Singaporeans. Tay Ping Hui and Dong Su Hua were the emcees of the day and the GOH was Mr. Goh Cheok Tong.

Sun Ho was also performing but almost every Singaporean that we met wasn’t interested in her. Hahahaha.

Soon enough Mr. Goh arrived (with so many body guards surrounding him) and so many reporters were interviewing him outside the Bridal Room so the whole area was sort of blocked. YJ and I wanted to walk past to get to the cocktail reception so we just cut across and we stepped into the body guards’ boundary and so many people were staring at us.

The bell rang to indicate that it was time to go inside the ballroom to be seated and everyone started making their way inside slowly. Goh (our manager) asked YJ and I to stand outside the main door (a.k.a hostesses) while the other 2 actual hostesses stood inside the ballroom. We were supposed to stand there until Mr. Goh went into the ball room. And yes, both he and his wife walked past us!

The gala dinner started and somehow the area I was assigned to already had many drink servers so I didn’t have to pour a lot of drinks. The wine bottles were easier to pour as compared to Opera Night though.

In between courses there were performances. The dances were really great and the drum performance was super cool. There was also a fashion show where all the clothes were designed by this famous Singaporean designer, Ashley Isham. Iskandar Ismal was also playing the keyboard throughout the whole fashion show.

We took a lot of photos but they are all still in YH’s camera! The event ended off with Sun Ho singing 2 songs.

After the whole event, there was a lot of photo taking going on. At first, we didn’t dare to take photos with all the people because we were still working and we were in our uniform. All the BQT staff was already clearing the tables and we didn’t help at all.

In the end, we took photos with Tay Ping Hui, Dong Su Hua, Iskandar Ismal, the organizer of this whole event, the florist guy and a few more people. Haha.

We then went to the bar area to look for Ehui and found a lot of water chestnut drinks and yeo’s soyabean. We took a few cans to drink and started chatting with the Singaporean ushers.

They brought us to the bridal room to take goodie bags! In return, we gave them a lot of cans of water chestnut drink.

Since we had no business there already, we walked to the backstage to find Ehui to tell him we were going off first. Instead, we found Goh and he asked us over to take more cans of drinks home!

Kelvin also asked YJ and I to deliver 6 bottles of wine to in-room dining before we left.

Overall, the whole event was super grand and we felt so at home with so many Singaporeans around us (:

http://www.singaporeseason.com

YJ and I then walked home with 9 cans of water chestnut drink and 2 bottles of Yeo’s Soya Bean drink.

Thank goodness we’re not working tomorrow and we clocked in 5 hours of OT today! :D

Ehui asked us back on Sunday at 7am because there’s another event (: More OT means more off days we can get next time on weekdays!

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KC: Oh shit, you for real?! Damn. I think it's because I'm forced to speak chinese when I do callings at work!

Today was as boring as ever.

We started off by calling more people to ask about arrival timings. I’m getting quite used to it already, but I don’t like the feeling of speaking in Chinese most of the time.

We called, updated Opera, send emails and the cycle goes on. We finally finished calling until the 29 Oct.

Today was kinda weird because the department ordered KFC and Starbucks for lunch. YJ and I only got a drink though because we so didn’t feel like eating KFC and rater eat staff canteen food :P Right, the real reason was because we wanted to look for Ehui during our lunch time so we didn’t want to be stuck in the office eating KFC.

But our plan failed because we couldn’t find him or Goh. BQT was super busy today setting up for Singapore Evening.

We ended work on the dot as usual, and we tried to look for Ehui again. Met Heubert on the way and he asked ‘Why aren’t you guys up at China Hall? They are rehearsing the Singapore Evening”.

YJ and I went up immediately and were greeted with many different coloured lions. The whole foyer felt so “Singapore” because we saw familiar logos like Uniquely Singapore.

We were surrounded by many Singaporeans too, just hearing their voices made us feel at home. It’s super weird!

The only rehearsal we saw was He Yao Shan rehearsing her performance over and over again. Oh, we know where Mr. Goh Cheok Tong is staying :P

Sadly, we can’t get our pay tomorrow. We can only take some sheet of paper so that we can take our pay on 30 Oct. Shit. I’m going broke soon.

To save cost, we came home to cook Maggie Mee for dinner! Watched “Little Man”, although I watched it before, it was super funny because I almost forgot the entire show.

After that Harris called and our place had super bad reception so we went over to Jie Ying’s room to gossip with him for a very long time!

I can’t wait for tomorrow though, we’re gonna support for Singapore Evening! I wanna see all the performances and be surrounded by all things Singapore (:

Work is seriously b-o-r-i-n-g.

We reported at 9am (was late for 15mins :P) and started keying in data for no-show. After awhile, Angeline asked us to do arrival calls.

To do that, we had to print out reports from Opera and manually filter those that we had to send emails to and those that we had to call. It took a lot of time and we had to do arrival calls for 26 and 27 Oct. We spent the whole morning doing it and Nancy had to call us in her office to brief us.

Patrick, YJ and myself were inside the room listening to her talk. She went on and on for like 45mins until I almost dozed off.

Lunched at the staff canteen today because we’re running low on cash. We spent the last half an hour walking around the hotel looking for Ehui or Goh. Oh, yesterday Ehui’s wife gave birth to a baby boy!

Too bad we couldn’t find them so we went back to work. Seems like they aren’t very willing to let us go back to BQT for support because Goh called them and he wanted us down for 5 days. SOS-ed Ehui and he wasn’t in the hotel today so we’re gonna look for him tomorrow.

Went back to the office and did more calls. We even printed out 28 and 29 Oct and sent emails to them first so we’ll have less work tomorrow.

All the filing is done by Patrick now cuz he can’t call because he can’t speak Chinese. After emailing, we needed to do the daily report and pass it to Nancy. We then updated more no-show data until 6pm and then we left.

Canteen food twice a day is a no no so we walked back home. Bought some pastry from Gourmet and then we walked past Citi Group building (right beside Shang). I had a strong feeling there was a Subway inside so YJ and I decided to find out. Asked the receptionist and omg there really was one small outlet! :D :D :D

The good thing is that it’s nearer than Pearl Tower and also they have offer’s for daily subs!

I was planning to cook Maggie for dinner but when we got home, Joanne and Angela wanted to walk around downstairs. We watched “Rob B Hood” first before heading downstairs.

It was quite quiet at first because there weren’t many stalls, but slowly more and more stalls were being set up and it was like how it looked like on Sunday (:

I didn’t have anything in mind to buy so I was purely looking for food to eat. In the end I went to buy Shao Kao, twice.

In the end, we spent most of the time at some stall which sells accessories because the quality was really good. I bought like 4 rings and 2 pairs of ear-rings. I also walked past a watch shop and bought a watch I really liked for RMB80.

It doesn’t matter if I go broke now because we can get our pay on 26 Oct! Hopefully no cock ups this time?

By the time we finished walking around it was already 11pm. We felt hungry so we decided to eat Shao Kao downstairs our home. I love some vegetable thing it getting so addictive. And it’s RMB1 for each stick! CHEAP like nobody’s business.

Came home and watched “The Heartbreaker Kid” before going to bed.

Work started at 9am today and we were 15 mins late because we had some problems with our uniforms.

In the morning, we were asked to call other hotels to check out their room rates. It was a pretty easy task because we could speak in English and act like we’re potential guests. But, it soon got boring because we had to repeat everything and ask about different periods of stay.

After we finished calling, Angeline started teaching us how to call to ask for guest’s arrival time. It was quite hard adjusting to speaking Chinese to ask every question but after awhile it got pretty okay. We spent quite a lot of time filtering out which guests to email or call though- and we were constantly using the Opera System.

Soon it was lunch time and YJ and I decided to go over to Super Brand Mall to eat Macs! Since we had 1 hour, we went to H&M after that and I already eyed which tops to get after work.

Went back to the office and did more calls. After calling, I helped Patrick send emails while YJ updated the calling records. And then we updated the no-show records together because it was so tedious.

It sounds so boring right? And trust me, it is! Office jobs are so omgboring. Although we have things to occupy us with, I’d rather be at BQT where things are so flexible.

We were supposed to end work at 6pm, so when the time was up, YJ and I tried to say goodbye but was stopped by Angeline. She asked us to reply emails and update the ETA of guests before leaving and also update some report thing. In the end we left at around 6.30pm.

Went over to Super Brand Mall to meet Angela and Joanne and they already finished dinner. So YJ and I went to eat while they shopped. After that I went to H&M to buy 2 more tops before going down to Lotus to meet the 2 of them and YH.

Did some grocery shopping and the most extreme thing we did today was to buy 30 bottles of Oolong Rose Tea. THIRTY 500ml BOTTLES (YJ, Joanne and I bought 10 bottles each).

Our whole cart was filled with the bottles and we still had 3 cartons of milk and 3 big packets of Oreo and a lot more nonsense. People that walked past us stared at our cart.

We didn’t want to risk trying to take a cab back because we had 5 people so we hurried and caught the last shuttle bus back to our place (:

Came home, packed out stuff and watched “The Invisible”.

I don’t feel like going to work tomorrow and be stuck in the office the whole day again.

YJ and I were supposed to be off today. But at like 10.30am, YJ received a call from Nancy asking where we were. We so told her we were working on Sat, so we’ll get Monday off in-lieu. She must be deaf. But who cares, we didn’t go to work today. Oops!

YJ watched her HK drama, and in the end we went out at around 1pm. Walked down to Ba Bai Ban for lunch. We went to eat at this Jap restaurant cuz from 11am-4pm there was a promotion going on.

The food is really nice and reasonable. YJ ordered kimchi and crab hotpot (RMB30) and I ordered beef pieces (RMB25). We ordered fried ice-cream and asked the waitress to serve it after our meal.

When our stuff came, the ice-cream came before all the food we ordered came. We told the waitress to keep it and serve it after we ate our meal but she said it didn’t matter because it was cold anyways.

So, I ate the first piece and it tasted quite nice (the ice cream was still hard) and after we finished our meal, I ate another piece and all the ice cream flowed out because it melted already.

What to do, COMPLAIN. The waitress made it sound as though it was our fault because we didn’t eat the ice cream when it came. But, we’re not the stupid ones. Of course we’ll know it’ll melt and already told the waitress to serve it after the meal when we ordered and told the waitress to keep the ice cream when it was served. In the end they gave us a whole new plate.

After eating, we headed behind Times Square because Ehui told us there was a warehouse. Sadly, a lot of shops were closed because in the morning there was a spot check and no one dared to open their shops to sell the goods.

In the end, YJ bought a wallet and I bought a bag to chuck all my clothes to send back to Singapore.

With nothing to do, we decided to walk home to watch a DVD and then go out again. Watched “Borat” and it sucked so YJ fell asleep and I started chatting with people online and use the internet.

I also started packing the stuff I wanna send back to SG and OMG I didn’t realize I had so much stuff! The seemingly huge bag couldn’t fit all the things I wanted to send back so I had to take out quite a number of stuff and leave it here. I wonder how I’m gonna bring all my stuff back when my attachment ends! Maybe cargo it if I have too much stuff!

In the end the both of us got lazy and Angela and Joanne came home. Joanne was hungry so YJ, Joanne and I went down to eat at Lan Zhou. After eating, Angela joined us and we walked the streets again.

I was so lazy to change I wore tee-shirt and shorts down with only a jacket. The weather outside was like 20 degrees? No one was wearing shorts and flip-flops.

Today wasn’t a very good night though; there were lots of police patrolling the area so there were super little stalls set up.

We saw the police car coming and a lot of stall owners grabbing their stuff and running away.

In the end, we walked all the way to the end again to buy doughnuts and strolled back hoping that more stalls would open.

Comparing to yesterday, the amount of stalls we saw was nothing. But, I still bought a pair of boots for RMB45! I think I’m crazy, buying so many boots. I won’t even use them when I’m back in SG. But it’s too cheap to resist!

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KC: Things are too cheap here man! And shopping is our only past time. Take care of your leg will you. It's time to give your body a good rest since you can't exercise now. Hahaha.

My day started really late today. I slept at 4am last night and woke up at around 2pm. Joanne was more of a pig than me because she slept earlier and woke up later :P

And although YJ woke up at around 9am to watch her DVDs, she went to nap at around 3pm and was so lazy to follow Joanne and me out.

Joanne and I headed opposite to eat tomato and egg fried rice before walking across the street to get our shoes repaired. I got 2 of my heels fixed and it cost me RMB12 only.

While waiting for our shoes to be ready, we walked to the MRT station because there were a lot of roadside stalls selling stuff. In the end I bought 2 bags and Joanne bought 2 sweaters.

With so many things in our hands, we decided to go home to chuck our stuff before walking down to Ba Bai Ban. YJ was so tempted to follow us because of the shopping so we waited for her to get ready before we went down together.

I LOVE walking the streets behind our place now. The weather’s real cooling and there are A HELL LOT of road side stalls selling stuff!

The 3 of us had no intention of shopping at all. Our purpose of going to Ba Bai Ban area was because Joanne wanted to get moisturizer from Watson’s and I wanted to go to Starbucks to see if there were anymore Halloween tumblers.

In the end, we walked and walked until Intercontinental Hotel (super duper far) and we bought a lot of things! I got a pair of boots, a pair of heels, a watch, an umbrella, 4 pairs of ear-rings, 2 caps, 3 bags and I don’t know what else.

We also filled our stomachs with street food like BBQ squids and sweet potato. Oh, we saw Mei Zhen Xiang Ba Kwa too!

Overall, I busted about RMB350 on unintended shopping today. I’m like left with RMB1000 to spend for the month and I’m planning to go shopping tomorrow and next week before I get my pay.

Ehui told us to report to work at 2pm today. It was my first time working at such a late time (:

The 4 of us all started work in the afternoon, but we didn’t walk to work together. Joanne started at 12pm, YJ and I at 2pm and Angela at 3pm.

YJ and I went to the Grand Ballroom to report and there were a lot of staff there already.

2 major events were taking place in the hotel at the same time and all the ballrooms were used up. A lot of other staff from other departments was called to support for these 2 events.

People from HR, Nadaman, Jade etc etc all came to support. They divided the servers first to Opera Night then the remaining went to the French Chamber event. YJ and I weren’t assigned to anything yet so we just stayed at the Grand Ballroom.

All serving staff was supposed to change into the BQT uniform. It’s so weird to see the HR people dressed in the BQT uniform because they are always in suits and now they are called to serve tables. So, obviously we changed into the BQT uniform for the night too.

The briefing took place at around 2.30pm and a lot of rehearsals were done for the food servers (where to walk, how to serve, how to keep the dishes etc). Floor plans were drawn out, team leaders were assigned to different areas and a hell lot of briefing was done to ensure that all the staff knows their stuff.

A few of us were assigned as drinks servers because the menu for Opera Night had different wines to go with the dishes. So we were assigned to pour all the different wines at our designated tables. Kelvin briefed us on it because he’s the Director of Wines and he is such a slacker compared to the others. He just told us what to do and then ‘smoke break’ or ‘dinner time’. Haha.

The cocktail reception was first, so we went to pour, serve and refill champagne at the foyer. After that, we went inside the Grand Ballroom and started pouring white wine when the guests were seated. We continued topping up white wine because it was meant to go with the first 2 dishes. After that, we started serving red wine for their main course.

For dessert, there was another type of white wine and there was a screw up. There weren’t enough bottles at the 2 bar stations. They took quite some time to get the bottles up and in the end we could only serve some tables the white wine when they were eating their dessert.

After the meal, it was the opera performances. One seat cost more than RMB1000 and for circle seats it cost more than RMB2000. And, we watched the show for free; not like I can appreciate Opera though :P

After all the performance, there was a chocolate buffet outside. YJ and I were assigned to the outdoor bar to pour red and white wine and cognac. It was damn fun because we could interact with the guests (handsome ang mohs). There was this young hot guy that kept coming back for more white wine and kept chatting with us. It was really cold outside and we were shivering!

YJ and I tried opening red wine bottles because we had nothing to do! We also chatted with the banquet staff to pass time.

We poured drinks until 11.30pm? I swear I haven’t stood for so long in such a long time. Headed back to the Grand Ballroom and they were already tearing down the set-up. We waited for all the guests to leave the foyer so that we could take the dessert and chocolates!

The Pastry Chef even asked us to take plates to get the pastry’s to eat. Oh, the chocolate was so good! We were eating non-stop.

After all that, we ended work already. At first, Cherry asked YJ and I to join her for dinner. Ehui offered to send us home via cab and Cherry also offered to send us home with her car. But in the end, we headed to BATS to look for Joanne and decided to stay there instead.

Maxim, Jennifer and Joanne were there. In the end, YH, Gabriel, YJ and I joined so it was like a mini Singapore (excluding Maxim and Jennifer) gathering. Rice and Cook were also at the other side of the bar.

We wanted to wait for Alan to come back to take photos with him because it was his last day and he’s flying to Beijing to work at Care Centre but in the end we couldn’t find him :(

After awhile, we decided to leave at around 2.30am. We didn’t cab back, 4 of us walked home (:

Overall, I think it’s a good experience for us to be involved in Opera Night, although we were made to be drink servers. We could see the planning, pre set-up and execution. It was really an eye-opener to see how a huge event was organized. We also asked Ehui to call YJ and I down if there are any major events so we can experience it and not be stuck at RSVN all the time.

Work started at 8am today and I’m happy!

YJ and I ate breakfast at home and I had yoghurt + pear. Yum!

I’m happy work started early because it was Ehui who asked us to report at 8am, to HIM! :D But when we reached, he wasn’t in the hotel yet. Haha. So we chatted with Tracy and went to look for Alan while waiting for him to reach.

Went up to Grand Ballroom to see how they did the set-up for Opera Night, walked around with Ehui and he said we could report to level 5 at 10.30am (:

YJ and I found a 6” Subway sandwich at the Banquet Office and it turns out to be YH’s (from yesterday). Called him and he said we could eat it! But when we went back to the Banquet Office, Tracy said it was thrown away already. We found it in the dustbin though, and picked it up to eat! :D WHAT?! It was still nicely wrapped in the plastic bag so there’s nothing wrong with picking it up from the small dustbin to eat it.

So it was 10.30am and we dragged ourselves up to level 5. We were given this thick stack of reservations to file and this time round, they made it more troublesome- we had to sort it by alphabetical order too. So, we had to first sort it according to type, then date, then alphabetical order. Super troublesome.

After sorting it out until the date, we were asked to help them send emails to ask guests about their ETA. There were 3 stacks of guests’ reservations so we took our own sweet time.

YJ and I used different computers so we didn’t waste time this time round. I had to log into the Opera System to check for the guests email and update their arrival and departure information.

While we were doing this, the department received a call from BQT office saying that they needed us there after our lunch (: [we asked Tracy to call them]

It was soon 12.30pm and down we went for our lunch. It was quite awkward though, cuz we were sitting with some people from RSVN.

After lunch, it was like we returned to BQT again. Walking around the function rooms, events concierge, BQT office. We did that until 5pm! Which means, we only went to RSVN for 2 hours (:

Also, I’m so tempted to buy iPhone! One of the BQT staff just bought one and it’s so pretty! China hasn’t launched the iPhone yet though, so it’s all fake goods (or shui huo they call- which is like the best type of imitation goods) But the thing is, it’s not cheap although it’s fake. The iPhone cost close to RMB5000.

After work, YJ and I headed to Super Brand Mall. Our aim was to go to UCOB to take photos of this coat we like and get it tailored somewhere else (so much cheaper I’m guessing). But first we went to H&M cuz they seemed to have summer sales going on.

I was so in the mood to shop, I bought 4 tops in total and the total cost was more than RMB500. Kill me. With that amount, I can buy like a hell lot more at Qi Pu Lu.

After that we went to UCOB to try on the coat and took photos of it. I don’t know when we’ll be going to the tailor to ask how much it’ll cost to make it though.

We then headed to Lotus to buy more yoghurt and fruits and walked home after that.

Stopped to have Lan Zhou Fried Rice for dinner because it’s so cheap and filling and yummy!

And our usual routine- YJ and I started watching a DVD. Today we watched “Kickin’ It Old School”.

We were supposed to get our weekends off in RSVN, but since tomorrow is Opera Night, we asked Ehui if we could be involved in it because we wanted to see the operations and all so we’re reporting to work at 2pm tmr (:

And for that, we get in-lieu off for Monday! :D

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Karen: Oh, HELLO!!! Hahaha. Yeah, DVDs are dirt cheap here. SGD.080 for 1! Of course we'll buy and watch!

Had breakfast at home today (: Ate the things we bought from Lotus. I had like Ritz biscuits with Philadelphia Cheese Spread :D

Slacked for about an hour from 9am-10am because Angeline starts work at 10am.

She told us that there was some error with the data entry we did and asked us to check again for the mistakes and correct it. OH MY GOD. It’s freaking crazy to do that.

We had to go through all the documents again trying to find what went wrong and we were so stoned from looking at all the tiny print. This time round, we took our own sweet time and did it until lunch time and we still haven’t tally-ed the thing.

Lunched at the staff canteen with Hans and Yu Hong, then YJ and I went up to China Hall to look for Ehui!

Okay, our main purpose was to pass him the bow tie he asked JY to get for him at Lu Jia Bang. And our other purpose was to whine a bit and complain. LOL. We chatted for like 20 mins before we had to go back up because lunch time was over.

Oh, they got another staff from the Sales Dept to do filing today. He’s also an intern, from Switzerland.

So we didn’t do any filing today, we just faced the computer. After giving up searching for the mistake in the document, we were asked to do another type of data entry which was SO BORING.

Then we were asked to send emails asking about the guests ETA and flight details. They gave us a template to follow but the English sentence structure sounded so wrong so YJ and I edited the whole email and used it as our template. Haha.

We also went to look for Nancy to tell her about Opera Night. Since we were already somewhat involved in it, Ehui wanted us back for the event. He asked us to report to work at 8am tomorrow and there’s a meeting at 2pm. Then we go to work on Sat for Opera Night and take off in-lieu for Monday :D

And at 6pm sharp YJ and I left the office (:

I had a craving for Subway so we walked to the Pearl Tower to get my sandwich and took a different route home.

We watched “It’s a Boy Girl Thing” (which is only out in cinemas on 26 Dec I think). But the show’s so typical- switching souls of this guy and girl who don’t like each other and in the end they fell in love.

Work at 8am tomorrow but it’s okay because we’ll be spending less time in that confined office. I wanna walk around the hotel!!!

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Yasmin: Yeah, we bought a lot of DVDs. 80cents only! Wth man. This is called no life can, everyday after work YJ and I would watch 1 DVD. Ahahaha.

It’s been quite some time starting work at 9am already; and this means that I’d be able to hear the songs the kindergarten plays every morning again (and I watched them doing morning exercises too).

We chose not to eat breakfast at the hotel today (damn sick of the food already) and we spent the whole morning in the office doing data entry for changes in reservations.

After all the overdue data entry we helped them clear, there were more sheets of papers for us to file. This time round, Angeline taught us how to file the faxes, emails and handwritten reservations.

Oh god, this spelt hell because it was so hard filing those types of reservations! We first had to separate it into months, then dates, then alphabetical order according to the company name. AND NOT ALL INFORMATION CAN BE FOUND ON THE PAPER. It’s here, there, everywhere so we took quite some time finding the information.

And when there wasn’t information regarding the booking dates, we had to log in to Opera to check.

YJ and I chose to take our lunch at 12.30pm but only left at around 12.45pm. Since Ehui, Cherry and a lot of BQT people were all off today, there was no point going to find them and hang out at the hotel so we decided to head to Super Brand Mall to eat our lunch.

Yeah, we were quite sick of canteen food so that was another reason for going out. When we were going out for lunch, some of the staff initiated to go together, but too bad YJ and I already decided on going out and not touching canteen food.

And when we were walking back to the hotel after lunch, we met Tracy! She was off today and was going to meet Cherry to go to Qi Pu Lu for shopping!

Headed back to Reservations Office and did more filing of those irritating fax/email/hand written reservations.

After clearing all the papers, we went to find Nancy cuz she wanted to speak to us. She told us what she has planned for us to do in the coming weeks. Most prolly we’re gonna be ‘shopers’ and fish out room rates for other hotels and also do data entry of call logs (which is also more than 1 month overdue).

Time passed quite fast and by 5pm we had nothing to do already so we started slacking. Surfed the net and replied emails to Mrs Tan. Played some games and then decided to go to GV’s website to check out the latest movies!

And then we realized that we’ve already watched some ‘coming soon’ movies such as Bratz, Good Luck Chuck. Those 2 are really nice and you can spend like SGD8 to watch it while I paid RMB4 for each DVD here (and it’s shared between 4 people?!) :D

Waited for 6pm and we ended work!! :D :D

Went to the staff canteen for dinner with Joanne and then headed to Lotus to do some grocery shopping! <3

Bought vinegar, yoghurt, cheese spread, fruits, biscuits etc etc (it was so heavy) but we still decided to walk home!!

And we didn’t head home straight. Before we went upstairs, we saw that the DVD place was open opposite our house so we went there first. In the end, YJ and I bought 10 DVDs! I know, we’re a bit crazy.

Watched “Men in White” today, it’s a Singapore/Malaysian production. I felt so “Singapore” when watching it because of the language and places and actors in it. I saw places like Bukit Merah (the stage I always used to walk past when going to Z’s office) and Raffles City, Esplanade Walk etc. The movie was quite funny but the ending sucked.

I think YJ and I will watch 1 DVD every night to pass time. Oh well, its dirt cheap!

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KC: Look the part? Funny ah. They sent us there because that dept was short of staff.

Ehui asked us to report to work at 8am today. Chatted (or rather whined/complained) with him and Cherry for 1 hour before going up to level 5.

For the first hour of work, no one entertained us. We went down again to take our mugs (so office like) up and took the chance to chat with some banquet people before heading upstairs again.

No one entertained us for about 1 hour. We were assigned to our desks and my computer couldn’t be switched on. So we looked at magazines and took turns to surf the net to pass time.

After that, a girl by the name of Angeline came to us with a super duper thick stack of paper. She asked us to do filing.

We were supposed to sort it according to dates and types. Tough job and it’s so tedious because it’s daily bookings of hotel rooms.

So for the whole morning we were doing filing and I hate it when they give us fixed timings for lunch. It was 11.20am when YJ and I finished a part of the documents so we wanted to eat. And to be nice, we asked Nancy if we could go for our lunch. She said that lunch was either at 11.30am-12.30pm or 12.30pm-1.30pm.

She even added that we might want to go for lunch together with the other colleagues but YJ and I were like ‘no thanks’.

Instead, we went down to Banquet and looked for YH to have lunch together. I know right, we are such anti-social people. But the people at Reservations aren’t really the kinda ppl YJ and I would like to mix with.

Since we only took half an hour for lunch, we still had another half an hour to spare. So we went to Events Concierge to slack for awhile and we found TREASURE!

Remember the chocolates we didn’t get to eat 2 days ago? Apparently I can understand Shanghainese already because when I opened the mini fridge in the cupboard to take out mints to refill the tray, I SAW 2 BOXES OF CHOCOLATES FROM THAT DAY!!

YJ and I totally lost it and started popping the chocolates like nobody’s business! We were so happy after that before heading up to level 5 again.

Did more filing and followed Angeline to the store room to take stationeries. Came back, and did more filing! We were finding the sheets until our eyes got blur. We had to match the confirmation numbers (which was 4 digits so it sounded like we were reporting 4D most of the time) with the Reservation and Cancellation/Change sheets.

After all the filing, we were taught how to do data entry. Yawn. How boring.

It was soon 5pm so it was time to go homeee!

The good thing is that time passed by very quickly but the bad thing is that we’re being confined in the office and there goes our social life. I so cannot imagine myself being stuck in that office for the rest of my attachment.

After work YJ and I headed over to Super Brand Mall to help Jie Ying change SGD then we walked home. Slacked for awhile before going down to eat Tomato and Egg Fried Rice (:

Came back and we watched this super boring movie called “Day Night Day Night”. And because Angela was showering, YJ and I went over to JY’s place to use the toilet cuz we were super urgent!

We then stayed there to chat for a bit and CF started playing “The Promise” on DVD. I watched for like half an hour before coming back home to sleep!

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KC: Yup, we have stuff to do. Filing and data entry? I'm not taking secretarial courses you know? Hahaha.

Sigh; YJ and I were asked to change departments again.

The day started off great because for the first 2 hours of work, we were just plainly chatting with Ehui in one of the function rooms while waiting for the upper management to come and decide on the table set-up for Opera Night.

YH then came to work and we slacked at Events Concierge for awhile before heading for lunch.

After lunch, we were asked to help turnaround the ballroom. At first, it was a hollow square set-up and when the clients went for lunch, we were tasked to change it into a classroom set-up. A lot of banquet staff was there and we helped out too. We moved tables, put table cloths, wear seat covers, placed pencil boxes and note pads on the tables etc etc. Time passed quite fast.

After that we slacked for a bit and Ehui asked the 3 of us to join in the Opera Night meeting at 3pm. It was kinda awkward because he asked the 3 of us to sit at the table (somewhere in the middle and opposite me was the big boss). Somewhere half way through the meeting, the GM walked in and sat behind YJ although there were still 2 seats left on the table.

We felt so extra and weird that the GM was sitting right behind us.

After the meeting we heard the GM ask our big boss “how many interns are here? Singaporeans.” We knew something was wrong already.

There was also some banquet training for the Opera Night and the 3 of us were told to sit-in and act like customers at the table so the banquet staff could practice how to serve and collect plates.

When the training ended, Goh told Ehui that Thomas wanted the 2 girls names (YJ and I). So obvious that something bad was going to happen already. Ehui sms-ed him and we waited for his reply.

Thomas said that the GM wanted to move the 2 of us to sales & marketing (either sales, MICE or events) department and we had to go for an interview with the person in-charge there. He didn’t state when the interview would be or whatsoever at it was already close to 5pm.

When we went back to the banquet office to look for June to ask about our September pay, we met Ehui and he received a call. He told us to go to Tower 1, level 5 to look for this lady named Nancy.

We didn’t know what was going on so we went to look for her and realized that she works in the Reservations Department. The moment we went in to look for her, we knew it’s confirmed that we’re being posted there.

Although she asked us if we mind being pulled out of Banquet and going to work for her, we knew whatever we said was going to be useless so we pretended we were fine and eager to learn.

But from what she said, I don’t believe 100%. She said we’ll be busy and even have OT but seriously, that’s what they said when we first went to In-room and Banquet.

I think it’s quite boring too. It’s an all female environment and the office is rather tiny. There are only 14 staffs working there. I do not like the idea of being contained in a small area for the rest of my attachment!

And the thing is; it seems like they are going to teach us how to use Opera System. YJ and I had 1 full semester of that under Justin and we don’t need more!

She said we’ll get to answer phone calls but I highly doubt so. She somewhat hinted we have to know the different types of rooms the hotel offers (more than 40 different kinds) and information about the hotel before we can answer the phone calls.

So by the time we’re familiar with the stuff there, it’s time to go back home already right?

The worst thing is that, she asked us to start work TOMORROW. And she even said that tomorrow and the day after they’ll be quite busy so they might not have the time to entertain us. I swear I almost blurted out to ask if we could just come in on Thursday.

She even told us our job scope tmr- FILING -.-

After speaking to her, we went back to find Cherry, Lucia, Tracy etc etc to COMPLAIN!

Headed back to Banquet Office to look for Ehui to ask him to help us and keep us for at least until the end of the week and he asked us to report to work to him tomorrow first but most prolly we’ll need to go there ASAP cuz it’s the GM’s decision.

Being so depressed already, YJ and I decided to head to Super Brand Mall to eat dinner. In the end, we settled down at this Japanese restaurant and ate a lot of sushi.

We were jokingly said we ate so much rice because of Rice (ahh internal joke nvm). Our total bill came up to RMB131 which is quite cheap.

Oh, we also headed to the money changer cuz YJ and I borrowed SGD200 each from Mrs. Tan and the exchange rate is 5.003! So high man! :D :D

Headed to Lotus to buy our mugs (for work -.-) and walked home. We went to the DVD place to change 1 of the DVD cuz it wasn’t working yesterday.

Came home and watched “Bratz” and JY and CF came over and we complained to them about our job!

Ehui told us to report to him at 8am tmr first though. Our working hours would be from 9am-6pm with our weekends off.

But the bright side would be: the off days I owe most prolly would be written off? Cuz of the change of dept.

I’m just so not looking forward to work tomorrow :( :( :(

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Minx: oh HELLO!!! Yup, you don't know Tracy. She's a Shanghainese and one of our colleagues working as a sectary in the hotel. I don't know why she added you though. Haha.

Breakfast in the staff canteen was great today because they served jiao zi, hash browns and dumplings (:

There weren’t any events today and it was rather quite; maybe it’s because it was a Sunday.

Today was a good working day because Goh was on off and YJ and I didn’t do much for the whole morning.

Met Ehui at around 10.30am and followed him around to check all the function rooms to see if they are being set up and if everything was in order.

There was a wedding going on tonight, 2 full day meetings, an outdoor catering event and 2 site inspections.

YJ and I then went for lunch and when we returned, Ehui asked us to follow him out of the hotel.

The 3 of us cabbed down to Puxi’s Lu Jia Bang. It’s a place where a lot of tailors are and they customize suites, winter clothing etc etc.

Ehui was there to collect his suits he tailor-made last time. I think the price is quite reasonably cheap and I’m sure I’ll go tailor a couple of suites before I return to Singapore (:

After getting his stuff we cabbed back to the hotel and Cherry, Tracy, YJ and I watched Ehui eat his Burger King lunch.


We then all went up to the function room to prepare for the site inspection. Tracy changed into Jade’s hostesses uniform because she was tasked to serve chocolates.

There was a wide display of pretty looking chocolates for the site inspection! YJ and I were so tempted to eat the chocolates because we heard it was damn good.

We weren’t of much use at the site inspection so YJ and I headed down to the Lobby Lounge to look for Joanne. She was playing with this baby and his parents lived in Singapore for 2 years (dad’s a French and mum’s a Malaysian). Chatted with them for a bit and headed up to see if the inspection was done so we could eat the chocolates.

Sadly, the both of us only tried 1 chocolate each. We had a passion fruit piece and it was oh-so-good. We wanted to eat more, but all of them were rushing down to the outdoor catering site already so we followed them although we ended work already.

We decided to follow them because we wanted to take a look at it. It was so near; at The Bund (less than 5 mins walk from the hotel).

Since the weather was so cold already, YJ and I were freezing!! The whole set-up was impressive though; a huge stage, cocktail reception area and a buffet spread for 200pax.

The strange thing was that the whole area was blocked up and there were actually people crowding around waiting for the event to start despite not knowing what it was about.

We stayed for a bit, and Cherry & Tracy explained to us some of the things about the event. After that YJ and I decided to go back to the hotel to change because we were freezing until our feet turned numb.

Since Jie Ying told us that there was a Subway at the Pearl Tower, we decided to go hunt for it and eat it for our dinner. Walked all the way to the Pearl Tower and we were greeted by the familiar yellow and green Subway logo! :D :D :D

Ordered our sandwich and sat outside to eat. It was such a lovely feeling eating a sandwich outdoors with such cool weather.

After eating, we called Tracy to ask if the performance started already and she said no. So YJ and I walked back to the Bund to see the performances.

On our way there, we saw fireworks! We thought it was from our event, but in the end it wasn’t. Tracy brought us in and there was some musical performance going on but YJ and I felt so out of place because we were in our home clothes.

We only stayed for a bit before deciding to walk to Jia De Li to buy water before heading home.

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Minx: Eh, who's this? Tracy is a colleague from work.

Work started at 8am today, which means I was up by 6am when I slept at around 1.30am last night.

Too much gossip already, that’s why we slept so late.

Ehui’s off today, so we were following Cherry around. There weren’t any events going on today so we had nothing to do.

But we were made personal assistants by Goh and I’m not very happy about it. The things he asked YJ and I to do was really quite weird.

Firstly, we were at the Ballrooms (tower 1, level 2) with Goh. Then he asked us to go down to the Banquet office (tower 2, basement 1) to print out a to-do-list email that was drafted by him.

So YJ and I went down, printed out the email and went back up to look for him. He edited the email and asked us to go down again to type the email and print it out. After printing it out, we went up again to show him and he edited the email a bit more. He then told us to go down again to edit the softcopy and save it.

After that we stayed at the banquet office for quite some time with nothing to do. Cherry was upstairs and Goh was somewhere around. So we used both Goh’s and Ehui’s computer to go online!

YJ and I were supposed to knock off at 5pm but when 5pm struck, Goh was like “let’s go”. And we had to follow him al the way up to the Ballroom.

When we were there, he totally ignored us and started a meeting with some clients. The only thing he asked us to do was to move 2 chairs from the VIP room out so that they could have the meeting outside. -.- After that we were totally treated as transparent by him so we went to find Cherry. And Cherry said we could go already.

Went back to the Banquet office to look for Tracy and Niki and they were going off too.

There was a dinner tonight for the whole banquet department because of the incentives they had selling moon cakes. Ehui booked 10 tables at some restaurant and there were 14 dishes in total + 15 bottles of beer per table + 2 bottles of wine per table. Each table cost about RMB900.

So if you do your math, there were a total of 150 bottles of beer and 20 bottles of red wine.

8 girls met outside the staff entrance and we took 2 cabs down to the restaurant. YJ and I shared a cab with 2 hostess (they are like 1.77m tall and skinny. They came from modeling schools) and 4 of us aren’t Shanghainese. The cab driver brought us to the wrong place but it was the restaurant we were supposed to go. So we had to take another cab down to the restaurant.

Dinner started off okay although we waited quite some time for everyone to come before we started eating. But after awhile we couldn’t take it our table (9 girls + Yu Hong) started eating the cold dishes. It wasn’t enough for us and we took seconds from another empty table.

The food was great and after dinner almost everyone started to get high. The experience of going to dinner with such a big group of people was really fun. The people here drink like nobody’s business and smoke like nobody’s business.

They could finish the 150 bottles of beer and they are still not drunk. We saw a few guys getting high though.

Some of the guys kept asking YJ and I to drink red wine and in the end we were the only 2 girls left with the guys because slowly a lot of them went home.

YJ and I were fine with drinking because the atmosphere was already so high but there was a spoiler lah. In the end we only drank like 2 glasses of red wine. And their red wine is nothing, won’t get drunk. It was quite sucky because we wanted to stay longer and have fun but we had to go because of some reason. Damn sian.

The restaurant was so near our place; 5mins cab (RMB11). So we reached home at 10pm which is like freaking early. Gossiped for 1 hour with JY (:

My shift has been planned out for next week already. Working at 8am everyday and I’m only getting 1 day off because I owe them off days and repaying them back slowly. Thank goodness YJ and I have the same shift for this whole week (:

I got woken up today at 8.15am by the sounds of the kindergarten beside my apartment.

At 8.15am everyday they’ll start blasting the speakers with 3 songs. Some “Xiao Yan Zi” song, “HERO” and lastly China’s national anthem (which sounds so communist in my opinion).

There were a few times I looked down and the kids were doing morning exercises to the 2 songs.

Right, so I went back to sleep at woke at noon time (:

Did laundry and swept the floor.

Thank goodness I could use the internet otherwise I’d be so bored the whole damn day. Fara and Harris entertained me for the whole afternoon.

Hopefully Harris will be going to America for his OIAP so I can go visit! :D :D

Watched 3 movies today; “Surfs Up”, “The Nanny Diaries” and “Unaccompanied Minors”

Also heard abt some stuff from home. I shan’t say anything here because I know who reads my blog.

And we started gossiping the whole night abt some people.

Work tomorrow though, 8am!

I spent the whole day slacking home today (:

Woke up at around noon time and started packing all the new clothes I bought. I had a hard time looking for space to put those thick winter jackets so it’s still next to my bed right now.

I’ve also taken out some clothes and stuff that I won’t be wearing here anymore and put them into my luggage (I think there’ll be more to come at the end of the month).

Hand washed some clothes (yes I can’t believe I’m actually doing this) and tried to upload photos on my blog.

I swear it’s irritating the shit out of me. My photobucket isn’t uploading the photos fast enough and blogger doesn’t allow me to upload photos. Maybe it’s the internet connection problem. I tried a few times and gave up. So too bad, no photos on my blog. I’ll put them up Friendster since it allows us to upload 1000 photos now! :D

I also watched “Licensed to Wed”, “Pussycat Dolls Live in London” and “In Her Shoes”.

Gonna watch more DVDs tmr and slack the whole day again because I am just too lazy to change and go out (okay the real reason is because I don’t wanna spend any more money!).

It’s my off day today! :D

Woke up at around 10am and lazed around for a bit. We watched “Good Luck Chuck” before heading out of our house.

There was a cockroach in our fridge today and it was still alive! Omg I had no choice but to take tissue paper to kill it. I can’t believe I did that!

YJ, Joanne and I were on off today. We went downstairs to eat at the Lan Zhou place. I think that’ll be my new source of food. We ordered some tomato and egg fried rice and it’s so yummy! :D

After that we took a train down to Nan Jing Road and walked to Qi Pu Lu for shopping!!

We reached the place at around 2pm so we didn’t have much time to shop (they close at 7pm).

I bought quite a number of stuff today. The 2 winter coats made my expenses go up because one cost RMB200 and the other cost RMB138. It’s considered super cheap for thick winter coats if you convert it into SGD. (:

I spent a total of RMB616. I am so screwed because I’m now left with approximately RMB1000 to spend for the rest of the month. Sigh, no more shopping trips down Qi Pu Lu until next month when I get my pay.

We shopped till they closed and cabbed home to chuck all of our stuff. We were each carrying 2 big garbage bags of clothes!

After chucking our stuff at home we wanted to go down for dinner because we were starving! Jie Ying went down with us because she also hadn’t had her dinner.

This time round I ordered beef fried noodles (RMB7). It came in such a big portion that 2 hungry people can share it and feel full after the meal.

Headed back home to sort out our goods and also settle money. We then watched “The Game Plan”.

I love the weather today. It was sunny but the wind was cool; my kinda perfect weather.

Surprisingly it didn’t rain a single bit today!

We didn’t turn the air-con on yesterday night but it felt like we did! That’s how cold the weather is right now (:

I heard from Hans that there’s no autumn in Shanghai. At most 1 week or so then it’ll be winter. Tracy also said that it’ll only get colder and colder now.

Since there was no rain I walked to work again. I wore shorts (wrong choice) and a thin long sleeve top. I was freezing because the wind was so cold.

We had nothing to do at work again today! There were so little events happening even Cherry told us straight in the face she didn’t have anything for us to do.

We spent the first hour of work reading through some fact sheet about the hotel’s room size and prices and also different banquet packages.

After that Cherry didn’t know what to let us do so she asked us to go have our lunch at 11.15am. We started work at 10am and in 1 and a half hours time we’re dismissed for lunch. Haha.

Joanne and YJ were at Super Brand Mall cuz Joanne started work at 12pm and YJ was off. So YH and I went to the mall to meet them for lunch. Apparently we could go out to eat without changing (we just need to remove our name tag).

Had Burger King for lunch! No staff canteen food! Yay! After lunch we went back and looked for Ehui.

There was a meeting for all banquet staff at China Hall at 2pm and Ehui wanted to go have his lunch with Cherry and a few others. He asked us to go take a stroll until it was 2pm and meet him at China Hall. We had like more than 1 hour to ‘stroll’ so YH and I decided to go to in-room dining to look for Hans, Benny and Tony (:

Ate bread and talked nonsense with them; time passed super fast. We then went up to China Hall for the meeting.

It was actually a presentation by Goh and Ehui about the damages done to the equipment in the hotel due to moving stuff in and out. I was tasked to help them click the slides and it was a good thing because I didn’t fall a sleep.

The whole meeting lasted for about an hour then we went up to T1’s ballroom to look at some technical stuff which I totally didn’t understand. They were discussing about LED lights, screens etc.

YH and I had nothing to do again and we just followed Ehui and Cherry around. In the end we were supposed to meet Ehui back at the Banquet Office to discuss about the layout of Opera Night.

Waited for him but he was in a meeting so we went up to find Hans. Helped him type a couple of emails and chatted with him before heading down again to find Ehui.

Thomas didn’t reply his email so there was nothing to discuss about the layout. We then chatted and he didn’t know that the 3 of us didn’t take our pay for Sept. Too bad the finance dept already knocked off when he tried calling them. But I’m sure he’ll get them to pay us so we don’t have to wait until the end of this month to get our pay for Sept!

Chatted with him until 7.30pm (we were supposed to end work at 7pm) and we headed down to the staff canteen for dinner.

Headed over to Super Brand Mall again because I wanted to go to H&M (but I didn’t buy anything). I also went to the back to draw money for shopping tmr! Shit man, I’m left with RMB1000 in my bank and it’s gotta last me until the end of Oct if Ehui fails to help us get our Sept pay.

Walked around Lotus and killed time until 8.30pm so I could take my free shuttle bus home. I don’t mind walking home but seriously it was too cold and what I was wearing didn’t really help.

And after 2 days of work, I’m gonna be off from Wed-Fri. Going back to work on Sat! (:

It rained today, heavily!

Work started at 10am for me and YH. YJ’s on off so I had to walk alone to work.

It was raining heavily with super strong winds and I WALKED to work with my multi-coloured umbrella. It was freezing cold cuz the wind was so strong.

I think today the rain was somewhat considered like a typhoon already; a mini one though.

There was nothing much for us to do at work today as usual.

Cherry was off so we followed Ehui the whole day.

There was a meeting for Opera Night so we sat in and felt like extras again. They were discussing about ticket sales and the floor plan at the foyer.

Since it’s an internal event a lot is done by the hotel especially in the Banquet Department.

And because YH is assigned to this event, Ehui asked YH to come up with the floor plan for the foyer and propose it to Thomas.

It’s not a simple drawing on Microsoft Word floor plan; this floor plan needs to have photos of the exact location and furniture we propose.

So we spent almost the whole day going down a few times (because there was an event going on and we couldn’t move the furniture around) to the foyer taking photos, going to the Banquet Office to upload the photos (because only Alan’s computer can read USB ports) and then going to the Event’s Concierge to draw the floor plan (because only Cherry’s computer is free for us to use).

All these 3 locations are very far away form each other. The foyer is at tower 1 level 3, banquet office is at tower 2 basement 1 and event’s concierge is at tower 1 level 2.

Work ended at 7pm and my initial plan was to go down to Super Brand Mall to eat Burger King for dinner with YH. I was also planning to drag and waste time till 8.30pm to catch the shuttle bus home because it was raining so heavily and I didn’t want to walk home (no cabs in Shanghai when it’s raining).

But we met Benny on our way up and he also ended work. He wanted to eat at the staff canteen so we accompanied him and ate there in the end. He also wanted to go down to Super Brand Mall to get some stuff from Lotus so all 3 of us headed there.

The moment we stepped out of the staff entrance the wind was crazily cold and strong! Thank goodness Super Brand Mall was just next to the hotel and walking outside was minimal.

My plan of dragging time till 8.30pm failed. Benny told me that I could take a bus from Lu Jia Zhui interchange which was quite near the mall and he was taking the same bus home so he showed me where to take the bus and where to alight.

The bus-stop wasn’t very far from my apartment, about 5mins walk. It was cold like shit and did I mention I was only wearing my jacket and shorts?

I’m gonna go watch ‘Becoming Jane’ now, work tomorrow again! Pray hard it wont rain heavily there’s no typhoon tmr otherwise I’ll have a hard time going to work and coming back.

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KC: Lesson learnt (not the worms part though cuz I didn't know!) But yeah, those few days were enough.

My day started off bad although I’m on off today.

Firstly I got woken up at like 6am by the noise made by the dogs and went out to find that there was poop and pee here and there.

Cleaned the whole floor up, changed the newspaper (took me more than half an hour), fed them and went back to sleep.

And at around 10am when YJ woke up, she told me Latte pooped again and I had to wake up to clean the mess up. Sushi also pooped and there was pee on the floor. So bloody irritating I swear.

Cleaned the whole floor up again and this time round I put Latte and Sushi into the cages and chucked them outside cuz I wanted to mop the whole floor.

And when I went to the toilet, guess what? The toilet bowl got stuck and it can’t flush! Tried flushing it but the water rose to the brim (thank god it didn’t overflow!)

Then the shower tap was also leaking. It’s not a small leak, its like worse than that! Ugh, so irritating!

Called up our landlord to tell him about the problem and he said he could only reach at 3pm. He asked us to open the tile to see if hair was stuck inside as it might be the cause of the stuck toilet bowl problem.

I can’t believe I stuck my bare hand to pull out all the hair and my efforts were wasted because it didn’t help clear the stuck toilet bowl!

The landlord’s dad came over at around 1.45pm to fix the toilet. In 1 hour, our whole bucket was filled with water that was leaking! You can imagine how terrible the leakage was.

Our toilet bowl was also fixed by him. He bought the sucking thing to pump the toilet bowl and after awhile it worked again. The most co-incidental thing is that Jie Ying’s apartment’s toilet bowl got stuck too! She borrowed the pump and tried doing it herself and thank goodness it worked!

I think Latte is sick. She was still fine yesterday but today morning I think she puked twice and shitted liquid. Oh gosh. Sushi also looks quite weak today and is still shitting out liquid. :(

Latte shitted again when I was in the shower. This time round it was all liquid. I think it’s really sick already; just like what Joanne’s friend told us. Since YJ can’t stand the smell of its poop and all I’m quite determined to bring it back to the store (if I can find it) and return it cuz it’s really causing too much trouble. I don’t know about Joanne though, I think she’s so emotionally attached to Sushi. But I’d rather return Latte now than see it be sick / die / suffer or get emotionally attached to it.

Latte’s so sick that she puked 3 times. The second time I thought she puked out rubber band but the third time I saw her puke and there was a live worm inside. SICK.

But since Joanne’s uncontestable at work and I had to get out of my house to take a breather, YJ, JY and I took a bus down to YH’s place at around 5pm.

The moment we reached the bus-stop we flagged for a cab down to Carrefour cuz we were so hungry (I only ate one pear the whole day).

We ate at SUBWAY. Oh my, that satisfied my 1 month craving for it (:

After Subway we headed for Carrefour to do groceries! I love grocery shopping. We bought a lot of toilet paper, water, gummy bears, yoghurt, herbal tea etc etc.

We shopped so fast that I tried to drag time because I didn’t wanna go home to face the puppies! That’s how bad it is. After shopping we sat down to divide the bill cuz different people bought different stuff for different homes. In total the stuff had to be split into 3 people’s houses.

It rained when we wanted to leave Carrefour. Heard that there’ll be a typhoon (AGAIN) tonight or tomorrow night. But we’ll see. Haha.

Cabbed to YH’s place to drop him off before heading to back home. Discussed about the puppies and apparently it’s illegal to buy these kinda road side puppies.

Latte puked again; this time round there were 4 live worms inside the puke. Poor dog.

We had no choice but to give it away. But the problem is to who and where?

In the end we found a vet nearby and cabbed down to give it to them. Hopefully they’ll take care of Latte and Sushi.

That’s the end of my “keeping a pet” experience. I think I’ll never ever wanna keep a pet anymore. It’s way too troublesome.

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Jun Wei: What rubbish, of course you're gonna fly back (for tour)! Hahaha.

Because we had nothing to do yesterday, we were told to report at 9am instead.

All 4 of us (YJ, Joanne, YH (yes he stayed over at our place again) and I started work at the same time we decided to cab down (:

There was nothing much to do at work today though and I was sort of sleepy because the dogs were barking like mad yesterday night disturbing our sleep.

But a fight took place today between 2 male banquet staff though. Didn’t get to see the process but they were so stupid to fight right beside the CCTV so everything was caught on camera. And they were fighting over a whiteboard. They are interns and I think they’ll get fired. So stupid right, fighting because of something related to work and getting fired during internship.

We also sat in for one of their meetings which was so so so boring. I tried my best not to fall asleep but I couldn’t help it but doze off a couple of times.

There were also 4 weddings that took place in our hotel today. Saw the setting up and everything.

I was also shifting chairs around the VIP room to get a setup for the Opera Night’s jazz performance.

We then went up to the ballroom for Roll Call.

There was really nothing much for us to do today. We spent our day inside the Banquet Office and walking around the different ballrooms.

Our schedule for next week was planned today and guess what, all 3 of us are off tomorrow! :D :D

Next week I’m also off on Wednesday-Friday (: But I owe them 6 off days; it’s not that I want to, they scheduled me to take off because there’s nothing for us to do at work!

After work we headed down to Lotus to buy dog leashes and more stuff then we walked home.

The weather today was a little crazy. It’s super cloudy and the wind was quite cold.

Came home and played with Latte and Sushi until quite late. I’m like watching “I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry” (yes Jun Wei, the DVD works on my tv!)

Wth, there was a HUGE praying mantis in our room just now and no one dared to kill it. It was sitting right on top the table lamp and I had no choice but to take newspaper to whack it.

I didn’t dare so YJ took the paper to whack it while I took the air freshener as a replacement of insecticide. The moment I sprayed it, the stupid praying mantis jumped onto the cupboard and YJ tried to whack it twice but missed. It then jumped onto the floor onto Angela’s bag and we had a hard time finding where it was.

You could already imagine the screams coming out from YJ and I (Angela’s not bothering while Joanne’s bathing). We flipped the bag to find the praying mantis and when we found it I took a book and whacked it (while screaming) praying it would die. It took me a few more whacks until the praying mantis became flat and dead. I got YJ to clear up the mess. Oh what an experience.

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KC: Omg no way lah! Hahaha. So far I haven't seen any store selling them.

Work today was boring (oh what’s new!)

We reported at 8am and waited for awhile before Cherry came.

With nothing to do, Cherry asked us to wipe the pencil cases on display inside the rooms for a photo shoot later.

Rooms were set up in different styles to be shot for the hotel’s brochure. We saw how professional the photographs were shot for awhile before Cherry asked us to follow a banquet staff downstairs for I don’t know what reason, so we happily followed him down to the Banquet Store Room.

We didn’t know why we were told to follow him, but when we reached, he asked us to wipe glasses?! There was no proper table, the glasses were inside the container on the floor and we had to sit on plastic boxes to wipe the glasses.

Imagine 2 girls and 1 guy in suits sitting down in the Banquet Store Room wiping glasses. We invited many stares.

After wiping all the glasses, we had nothing to do. We asked if we could go back to find Cherry but he was reluctant to let us go. He asked us if we wanted to fold napkins but we refused.

In the end we realized that Cherry asked the Banquet guy to give us stuff to do because she had nothing to do. And since we didn’t want to fold napkins, we found 3 chairs inside the store room and started sleeping. We slept for like 1 hour before we needed to go to the toilet.

After our “Xi Hu” toilet break, we met Cherry and she asked us to go down to the Banquet Office to check the menu for the 2 weddings taking place tonight. When we got there, the lady there asked us to go to the Banquet Store Room again to take 80 wedding menu covers! When we got back, she asked us to go to the F&B office to photocopy 37 sets of the wedding menu and 43 sets of another wedding menu.

To make things worse, the photocopying machine there sucks. It’s forever having errors and we gotta open and close some part every time. So irritating! At first we didn’t even have white paper, we had to like go around asking for it. Sometimes people here are so not helpful.

So we took quite some time to photocopy the menus because of the faulty printer. And when we got back to the Banquet Office, the photocopied 43 sets were rejected because there was a faint line at the corner. We were asked to re-photocopy it again. Whoa PISSED.

After photocopying, we went to in-room dining to eat pastry before going down for lunch (:

We met Ehui on the way back and he asked us to follow him. We were assigned to different major events happening in the hotel already. YH’s gonna do the Opera Night, I’m doing Singapore Evening and YJ’s doing some Calendar Event.

He brought us to a function room where different set-ups were done for the big bosses to choose for the Opera Night.

In the end, some maroon design was chosen but the big shots wanted them to change the flower arrangements and napkin rollers.

We felt so extra when all the big shots were there discussing which set-up to choose. We stood there listening to them discuss and discuss.

Alan was there too and then he decided to tour us around the hotel again. This time he brought us to the offices where the MICE people were and then to Horizon Club Lounge to take a look.

After that we followed Ehui and Cherry to meet up with the client for my event that I was assigned to.

My event’s rather major and they are looking at around 670pax. The whole of China Hall would be used up and there’s still not enough space for the tables because of the stage they are gonna build. But no matter how major it is, I still don’t have much to do I guess. But hopefully I’ll be able to observe and learn a lot from this major event that’s gonna happen at the end of Oct.

After the meeting we knocked off at 5pm (: Headed down to Lotus to buy fruits and herbal tea before taking the shuttle bus back home.

Played with Latte and Sushi for awhile before YJ had to go down to the mall behind our house to collect her phone. The stupid repair centre said it’ll be done by 6pm but it still wasn’t done by 7pm. And apparently yesterday they said if it wasn’t done by 6pm they wouldn’t charge her. YJ called them and YH yelled at them refusing to pay a cent and finally she agreed.

So we walked down to collect her phone back and then went to eat dinner opposite our apartment. Headed to Jia De Li to buy water and other stuff before heading home.

Everyone came over (Chang Fang, Jie Ying, Yu Hong) and played with Latte and Sushi. They are our new source of entertainment but it sucks when they pee and shit.

Right, so Joanne’s friend who is a local was shocked when she told her that we bought puppies from the street. She said that nobody buys these puppies because they are already sick and they have injected stuff to make them active. They’ll only live for a few days? Sigh, we’ll see how it goes.

Actually we were supposed to start work at 8am tmr and the day after but Ehui asked us to reach at 9am cuz it’s quite pointless for us to go so early. Haha.

Gotta settle money first though before crashing!

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KC: Why do you think the puppies are dirt cheap?

I had intentions of going down to Qi Pu Lu to shop today but when I woke up, the weather was freaking hot.

We got lazy so we slacked around at home before walking down to the shopping area behind our house.

Found this Japanese restaurant which serves cheap food from 11am-4pm so we ate there. It was sort of my breakfast/lunch/dinner.

Window shopped a bit and there were a lot roadside stalls selling pets. Their pets include ducklings, chicks, squirrels, rabbits and puppies.

We spent like the whole evening at that area walking from mall to mall but not buying anything.

The puppies were super cute and tempting because it only cost around RMB100 on average. That’s like freaking dirt cheap.

In the end, I don’t know why in the world Joanne and I decided to buy puppies. We got 1 each.

Mine cost RMB50 while hers cost RMB90. It’s dirt cheap.

Brought both of them home before Joanne and I went to Jia De Li to buy dog food and some other stuff.

Okay, my dog’s name is Latte while Joanne dog is named Sushi.

We tried bathing the puppies and it was such a chore! Apparently my puppy is afraid of water.

After bathing, we had to dry the puppies and it was another chore. It pooped on the newspaper and stank like hell.

I swear it’s so troublesome keeping a puppy. But I’ll try my best to take good care of it.

I really think I’m mad; buying a puppy without thinking so much.

After 6 days of off I gotta go back to work tomorrow. And it starts at 8am. Sigh.

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KC: I hate being idle too, esp during work cuz time passes so slowly. We have 2 puppies in our house now! I think we're mad. Haha.

Today started off later than previous days because

1. we were all very tired
2. we didn’t know where to go
3. we needed to check out by 12pm

It wasn’t as late as you think, I was the first to wake up and I woke at 8.15am. But there were 4 more people who needed to use the bathroom and we still needed to pack all our stuff before checking out.

Because we were all so lazy, we stonned and lazed around until 12pm. We didn’t have anywhere to go and wanted to eat lunch at the city area again.

Hailed a cab and the cab driver recommended some restaurant selling local food along the city street so we went there to eat.

It was super crowded but we still managed to get seats by doing it the Singaporean way (stand next to the table and stare). The concept was to buy coupons then order food and give them the coupons. We ordered RMB100 worth of food but it didn’t taste very nice (we still finished everything though!)

After eating we were aimless again. Roamed around and saw a signboard selling dessert. We were trying to locate the store and walked one big round before realizing it was just in front of us.

Tried playing blackjack and heart attack but the management at the café didn’t allow. We stoned once again and didn’t wanna go out because the weather was like Singapore’s.

The air-con in shops and malls didn’t help too; seemed like there was no air-con.

We were too stonned that we decided to walk around. Having no where to go, we walked down to Carrefour (AGAIN).

Took a trolley and dumped in all our heavy barang barang before pushing it to KFC and slacked there again. After awhile, YH, JY and I went to Carrefour to walk around to buy more junk food while the other 2 stonned at KFC.

After Carrefour we walked back to the city area to go eat dinner at Prima.

SINGAPOREAN FOOD!

Ordered Laksa, Mee Siam, Kang Kong and Ba Kut The. IT was expensive though, and didn’t taste very nice. They had limited variety of food too. I miss SG food!

After dinner we cabbed down to the bus station to wait for our bus ride back to Shanghai. The coach was way much better than the train. It took us about 2 and a half hours to reach.

But we still had to cab back to our apartment (which wasn’t very far away).

I think I’m getting stomachache, been visiting the toilet since I came back. I must have ate something wrong.

There was also a blackout after we reached home. We had to go change the fuse of the main thing downstairs. My god, so troublesome!

Tmr’s my last off day already. I’m sleepy (its 3.05am) good night!

Last night was super duper stuffy (like the temperature when we were on the plane to Shanghai) and today morning we realized what happened.

YJ, Angela and I slept earlier than YH and JY and by 12am it was damn stuffy. They called housekeeping to complain but it didn’t work so the both of them went down to the lobby to complain to any manager they could get hold of.

The manager claimed that by 12am the hotel switches off the air-con and it was their policy. He even took out a newspaper article about hotel’s conserving electricity. His solution to us was to first lend us a fan (but he got shot by YH saying that the fan will only circulate hot air so it was useless) and then he suggested to open the windows (he got shot again by YH cuz the windows could only open a small gap and the weather outside was hot and there was no wind).

YH even chased away 2 guests that was about to check-in and demanded that the manager switch on the air-con. They were reluctant at first but in the end they gave in and the air-con was being turned on after awhile when they got back to our hotel room.

So today I woke up at like 6am and we cabbed down to Long Jing Tea Plantation. Acted like bloody tourists snapping photos everywhere we went because YH brought along his tripod and remote.

We then climbed this place while taking photos on the way up. The place is infested with mosquitoes and we got bitten quite a fair bit.

The weather was bad though- hot and humid and we were climbing in slippers!

Some scenes were quite nice but when we were making our way down, we passed by some area which was infested with hungry mosquitoes! Never in my life have I seen so many mosquitoes attack me at one time! Just keep any part of your body still at one point of time and you’ll see 3-4 mosquitoes landing there sucking your blood.

They were quite slow though, it was relatively easy to kill them. But in the end, we still got bitten! We were like running down and away from the mosquitoes but it didn’t really work.

We also saw a matchmaker at that area because one whole area was like a Chinese wedding setting. We took paparazzi shots of the matchmaker and the photos are CLASSIC!

After the tea plantation, we cabbed down to Xi Xi Wet Land because it had a AAAA rating in the tour book.

Admission was RMB80 but we told them we were students so it was half price. Went in and the staff there advised us to take a boat tour because if we walk we wouldn’t see much.

So each of us paid RMB60 for the stupid boat ride ticket. It works like a shuttle bus system that brings you around different areas of the wet land. We boarded it and headed to the first stop.

Seriously, there was nothing nice to see during the boat ride. We only saw murky water, trees, grass and boring dull plants.

We then boarded another boat after our first stop. We wanted to go to their Botanical Gardens to take a look so I asked the tour guide on the boat to tell us which stop to stop and she replied sarcastically with a “I’ll definitely tell you where to alight”.

Why sarcastic? I think it was because we made hell a lot of noise and she didn’t like us.

Anws, that’s not the point.

So while we were on the boat (sleeping/napping because it was so boring with nothing to see), suddenly it knocked onto another boat. It was quite a serious knock that sent our boat heading for the bushes. Our window was open so all the yucky stuff came in and we screamed and stood on the chair when we saw 3 praying mantises inside.

Then we heard the driver SOS so we knew something was wrong. When the boat was about to dock, it stopped by hitting against the thing and the boat jerked like nobody’s business because the break spoilt.

The driver even said that “it was only a joke”. Rubbish.

We then continued sleeping while waiting for the tour guide to tell us where to alight. Then suddenly, when the boat docked at some place she asked everyone to alight including us saying that it was the last stop of the boat route already.

Like, huh? We questioned her and she said that she forgot because there were too many people and the accident happened. Excuses I tell you. She wasn’t even the least apologetic and we were so pissed we wanted to complain.

She so didn’t wanna get involved and pushed the matter to the CRM dept. She didn’t even bring us there. We had to find our way down ourselves.

The service people suck I tell you. They don’t wanna be responsible for anything. We were transferred from people to people when trying to complain and finally this lady spoke to us.

She was so rude. She didn’t let us finish our sentences, let us wait for a freaking long time, laughed at the whole incident as if it was some kind of joke and refused to come up with a solution to satisfy us. All we wanted was our money back for the boat ride.

In the end we didn’t bother to give them face anymore. We created quite a big scene when they refused to refund us our money and demanded to see their manager. They refused and told us that refunding money was the finance dept’s job.

I was so pissed I walked all the way to another place where the HR dept was and demanded to speak to someone with authority. After finding some other lady, we reasoned out everything and in the end they fully refunded us our boat ride tickets.

If you’d ever come to Hang Zhou, never ever step into Xi Xi Wet Land!

After the whole commotion, we tried to cab down to the city to eat dinner. Cabs were so hard to get and when we finally got one, the driver refused to take 5 people.

A guy offered us his van (black car = illegal) but we refused. We told his we’d take it if he charged RMB30 but he wanted RMB35. We tried hailing for another cab but failed.

In the end we agreed on RMB35 for him to take us to the city for dinner. We looked like some losers but who cares! It’s cheaper than taking 2 cabs!

Ate Mac’s for dinner and we had nowhere to go again. So where did we go? CARREFOUR!

Bought more junk food and wanted to cab back to the hotel. There were cab stealers everywhere so we had to do the same in order to get a cab. You should have seen how we snatched the cab from other people! I can’t imagine us doing this kinda thing man.

Before going up the hotel room, we went to buy yummy mutton sticks! It costs only RMB1 per stick.

The hotel learnt their lesson, they didn’t dare switch off the air-con tonight.