The springboard [pt 1]
Shoo the strain away, let the stress-free breeze roll in. The fall mid-semester break is finally here! Truckloads of odds and ends to bargain after many weeks of shunning from using the Internet (for nonsensical purposes i.e. Friendster-ing).
For one and a half months I was a college student, and I still am one.
Room 2/306 is my den. A place where all four of its occupants would cluster together and at times do the same thing – gracefully gorging our nasi goreng pattaya or plain bread covered with either chocolate spread or mixed with white chocolate spread, (im)patiently getting the math conundrum solved, or yackety-yakking over some senseless stuff that goes overnight!
And there’s a small, seemingly dilapidating toilet across our rooms, no different from any other lavatory. Our house has gone through a … “hey-we’re-here-so-let’s-do-it renovation” recently. Unintentional. With a few drops of water penetrating our toilet wall and then bleeding like for EVER, and a fluorescent lamp that goes blipping to infinity, our front room now looks similar like those murky, spine-tingling scenes in the 2002 movie Dark Water! How cool is that eh.
Wished I had tons of oxygen tanks waiting for me.
The orientation week (or the Minggu Mesra Siswa as they called it) progressed with a number of activities round the clock. Sometimes we had to wake up as early as 5 in the morning and head back late at night when everyone else was dead buried in their bed, dipping into the innermost corner of their mind, fantasizing.
Since we’re under the American Degree Foundation Program, which also means All Day Fun and Play (ADFP students jargon), we had games most of the time during the orientation. I’ve played this new-to-me-but-old-to-some game called Cap Kelicap. It’s a good game I must admit! There was this guy, starting the game at a very slow pace and all of a sudden speeding up, making it harder for us to imitate his do-it-till-you-ran-out-of-breath moves! Too bad I couldn’t be in the top 6. Ahh, the Milo I’d missed..
Oh yeah, nearly forgot to mention about the bomb game – a game in which you’ll be playing in groups, bombing another group according to a leader’s command. We’re the Togolese so we’d go like “Togo bomb, Togo bomb, Togo bomb to India bomb”. The seniors left us in stitches when they were the first to lose! Sucha cute game, right. =)
When the sky was fully daubed with peach hue, we’d gather at the field to do some workout. All of us were leaping and grooving as if we’re dancing to some music of the 80s! I barely had any idea what pocho pocho dance was until someone next to me taught me how to do it. “So simple one,” as Mr. Ikhwan, my Math lecturer would say all the time. I liked the Chicken Dance most! The tune was quite catchy and the steps were not hard at all! =P
I’d rather kiss the ground than go into that… place! *Pbbt*
July x, 2007. Perfect day. The wind was traveling at a perfect speed. No one got roasted under the perfect glare from the Sun. With such perfect everything, nothing could possibly go wrong. But, one thing did. The brain. ROFLOLZOMG. I couldn’t utilize my brain well and had to face the consequence. I had never expected to be dumped into the place. Not in a million years, no.
Later that night, the last night of MMS, we’re supposed to set up something representing our programs. I loved everything and I bet everyone was enjoying themselves in the mirth. The committees, together with the A-Level, AUSMAT, and ADFP students had pulled quite an epochal event. Boisterous. Myriads of applauses swarmed the Great Hall of INTEC every time a program had finished staging their performance. Had the ADFP had more time to practice, we might be able to perform something better, far better than the clapping (which was previously performed by the A-Level students). Alas, we still dared to get onto the stage. Our performance was kind of impromptu, we’d only managed to clap and trample the stage together! Good times, but too bad, I didn’t bring anything to freeze the moments we had gone through.
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