FOOoooHH!! Haven’t updated my blog in 5 days. That’s gotta be a new record!
I’m sorry guys. Let me explain. Haha truth is I don’t really know what to update in the past few days. I’ve been back in Penang for CNY but my parents have made me promise not to put any picture of them on my blog. So the only CNY picture I can actually put up here is of this.
The one thing I get very addicted to every CNY.
We had a game going on among my cousins to see who could eat just 3 pieces of this and nothing more… while watching everyone else munch away. Nobody won this challenge. It was wayy too addictive.
One thing I noticed this CNY is how all my little cousins have the best of phones now. I remember when I was 13 years old, we had our little Nokias and all. Kids today don’t have Nokias. They have iPhones and along with their iPhones they have cute iPhone covers just like this.
I was supposed to go for an old school reunion dinner tonight but I can’t make it because I’ve finally fallen sick today and spent most of the day today in bed. I met up with some old school friends last night and they were telling me how I should go. How I would be “amazed” to hear what some of my old school mates do for a living now.
Sure many are engineers, accountants etc etc but one of them for example is a pimp. That’s right… a PIMP. He supposedly makes the most money out of everyone else too haha.
I don’t know what to tell my old school friends when I do see them one day either. If I did see them this year I would tell them the biggest change of my life this year would be getting married. Just a week before I followed Shorty to go try on some wedding dresses that she liked.
Only to realize later that the groom isn’t supposed to follow the bride wedding dress shopping. So I shall make it a point not to go anymore. Heh.
Ok I’m not feeling well now so I shall go lie down for a bit. I actually feel like having frozen yoghurt all of a sudden but I’m not sure if that’s the best thing for my cough right now.
In any case, Gong Xi Fa Cai everybody! May the year of the Dragon be a wonderful one for us all!
I gotta admit, when I first watched Tangled and saw the scene with all the “floating lanterns”, I didn’t believe that there really was such a thing in real life.
I thought it was just a Disney fantasy. Then one day I heard from my colleagues in the Philippines that Nuffnang Philippines did a blogger gathering some time last year where they got bloggers to release floating lanterns up into the sky together. When I knew there was such a thing… I knew I had to do it.. at least once in my life.
I just never knew I would get to do it so soon.
That “soon” for me was just recently on our company trip in Chiang Mai.
We had this nice company dinner on our last night at Chiang Mai. Right after the dinner everyone gathered around and the resort staff had a little surprise for us. They were going to let us release floating lanterns like this.
Everyone got excited and started letting go of them. When one of them floated into the air it was beautiful, when a few more followed it was a sight you would never forget. We didn’t have as many as the movie Tangled. But we had loads.
The Singapore team even released one together.
The one I released though had a little wish written on it. Got a video of it here.
Sorry just realized previous entry was cut off. Stupid wordpress. Here is the full version.
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On the second day of our company trip, we were all up early. Oh yeah let me show you some promised pictures of our room at the resort. This is the room that Ming and I shared.
The room was so nice it really looked like it was made for couples to shag on their honeymoon trips. Why? Because in the bathroom was this huge Jacuzzi meant for two.
The room and the Jacuzzi however, were wasted on Ming and I. We were really cautious about letting the room get to us. We made sure no bromance kind of shit happened right there.
So anyway on the second day,I got out of my room by 7AM. It was bright out though so I took a picture of a part of our resort which had this tower thing. That’s the entrance to the lobby of the resort.
We all had breakfast and we then headed to the elephant farm where we caught an early show of trained elephants doing all sorts of tricks.
We even saw elephants draw pictures of themselves or pictures of scenery with paint and water colour. It was amazing. I saw this one painting later drawn by an elephant which featured an elephant humping another elephant. Yes… I supposed elephants have porn too.
Throughout the show I could feel Clara’s excitement from right next to me.
We also went for an elephant ride. There were 50 of us Nuffies there so it took 25 elephants to bring us from one end of the farm to another.
Riding on elephants is loads of fun. I can’t explain why… maybe it’s because you’re sitting really high up and really because when the elephant walks from side to side you shake a lot and think you’re going to fall off.
It was real cute seeing Yuen Yee and Wenny ride the elephants. They’re both terrified of heights and riding on that elephant was hell to them and you could see it in their facial expressions. By the end of the ride though they both admitted they had loads of fun.
So when the elephant ride was done, we all went…
on a bamboo raft ride down the river.
They gave me a chance to control the raft from the front at one point. But I was so bad at it my raft went sideways and nearly went off the river.
So most of the time we just sat there and took pictures. Here’s what with me and Raessa.
The bamboo raft ride was the last activity on the elephant farm. After that the tour brought us to this umbrella factory where we could buy all the touristy kind of stuff (and the tour guides could earn a commission or something).
Unfortunately most of us didn’t buy anything apart from an aunty that had this small ice-cream stall. All of us went in there and cleared out her fridge for the day.
The one person that DID do lots of shopping though was Wenny.
Wenny is the oldest Nuffie in our company. She’s married with two kids and she helps manage our finances. So she’s like an aunty figure in our company that tells us what we can afford and what we can’t afford. She was our first full-time accountant that joined us in the early days of Nuffnang and was there all the way to see Nuffnang/ChurpChurp grow. Throughout the whole trip she did loads of shopping for her family and her kids. Including loads of baby clothes.
Unlike the rest of us that mainly just went around buying ice-cream or coconuts.
After the umbrella factory, we all went back to the resort and everyone went their own ways. Some went shopping, some went for massages. Firdy, Min and I though decided to check out the clubs in Chiang Mai. So we went to this club there called Warm-Up. I love Thai clubs. Their format is really like Neverland in KL. You have live performances and when the live performances take a break, good RNB or dance music comes on. So we went to check it out… and also to check out what a lot of my Thai friends in Bangkok have been telling me about Chiang Mai.
When I told my Thai friends I was going to Chiang Mai for a company trip they all said “Chiang Mai girls are VERY PRETTY”. So ok! We were determined to put that to the test. After that night I can say… YES everyone. It is true. Chiang Mai girls are the prettiest girls in Thailand. Then again, when I got back I told Shorty that and she didn’t believe me. She always doubts my taste in women.
The atmosphere in Thai clubs though is amazing. You know how in KL or Singapore when you go clubbing, most people are quite stand around their tables and are quite conscious about how they look like to other people in the club. In Thailand, everybody doesn’t seem to care about how they look. They just go there, jump around and want to have fun.
Anyway one highlight for me that night was when we were trying to figure out how to go to the club. We called some taxis but they all weren’t free to take us so we resorted in booking a tuk tuk. Our tuk tuk though wasn’t just ANY tuk tuk. It was this one.
Glowing with neon lights and all YO! All setting the mood for clubbing. We took a picture on board the tuk tuk and this is how we looked.
Like the Blue Man Group.
The joke was we were talking among ourselves on the way to the club in the neon-lit tuk tuk. I said “I hope the tuk tuk doesn’t drop us right in front of the club. Otherwise we would all arrive damn unglam la”.
Some 15 minutes later… here was the scene at the entrance of the club when we finally got there.
Nice cars were in a queue taking turns to drop beautiful people off for a club night out. Then after one car, one little tuk tuk covered in blue neon-lights appeared and stopped right in front of the club with everyone looking. Three grown men squashed in the back alight and walk as cool as possible to the club.
Yes… everyone was looking. I’m not sure if they were looking at the fact that we came in a tuk tuk or because our tuk tuk looked like a UFO from the 60s.
