Posted at » 10:04 PM
Friday, June 09, 2006
We went to Awana Resort in Genting Highlands for our church camp this year. Jeremy Ong hitched a ride with us in the car, and we drove up together with mark's and kenny's family, and peide tagged along with mark.
We reached the resort at about 5pm monday, and i checked into my 25th storey room with kenny my roommate. We were next to Alex and Jeremy. the lobby is on level 8, and the bottom level is level 7. The rooms all have a breathtaking view of the surrounding mountains and clouds, which sometimes enveloped the hotel. The temperature is generally cool, around 23 degrees.
The sermons were by Mr. Tony Yeo, and i must say he is a great speaker.He's interesting and knows his work. This year's camp theme was "Living For What Really Matters".
Overall, i think that last year's location for our church camp, at MINES Resort in KL, was a better choice. The sun and the sandy beach and the nice lagoon-pool were perfect for running and playing sports, and there were many shopping centres nearby. Awana Resort is cold and a bit run down, and is wet most of the time because of the heavy rains that come dutifully every afternoon. Also, it is in the middle of a mountainside with nowhere to visit, except Genting Highlands theme park which is so far away that we need to take a coach and a cable car just to get there.
On tuesday and thursday, we played tennis in the afternoon. There are 5 tennis courts there, and 4 out of 5 are in a horrible state because of disuse. the floor was blackened with rot and moss was growing. They only maintain 1 out of 5, and this court is odd because it has slight depressions, so that rain collects in puddles. It rained both times we played, and when a ball bounced into a puddle, it would dampen the bounce heavily and cause an unnatural bounce. We played badminton too on thursday.
On wednesday we took a trip to Genting theme park! We went on 2 rides in total, the Space Shot and the Corkscrew. The Space Shot was a ride in which the people are strapped into seats around a 10-storey column. the seats then are lifted to the top of the column, where there is an amazing view of the surrounding countryside. then the seats are dropped all the way down, and a force slows the seats so that it doesnt crash into the floor. the free-fall feeling of that ride was the scariest part. Kenny covered his eyes at the top! hahahaha. =D the Corkscrew is a roller coaster with quite a number of - guess? - corkscrew turns. It turned out to be less scary because we had sat the Space Shot before we went on the Corkscrew.
Thursday night was the final night, where i made everyone laugh with an over-zealous line dance parody. Expect the video to be on Youtube soon. =P We also had the Indian Chief and Indian Princess dress-up contest during the barbecue dinner, where we sent peide as Indian Chief and Esther as Indian Princess. We got an extremely unfair last place for both competitions! We put it down to "kiddie points", which means that the younger the kids, the more points they will get in dress-up competitions due to cuteness. Blah. In the end, Jurong Family Group got last place in the overall point standings. So horrible. Haha!
On friday morning we went back to singapore. Kenny forgot his shirt and left it in the closet during check-out, where i found it after i went back to double-check the room. Alex tagged along in our car in addition to jeremy, because the rest of his family was going to Muar to visit their relatives and he didn't want to go. So we had a a squeezy ride back to singapore.
I missed almost all the Roland Garros French Open tennis matches when i was in malaysia! I just reached home in time to catch Rafael Nadal's semi-final match against Ivan Ljubicic. Watching it now =) Nadal's just won two easy sets and doing pretty well with the third. Go Nadal!