BUT. it was fun. seriously fun. i wish i can go back to experience it again... its probably not as life-changing or one-shot as OIP but thats why its so great: i probably can have some more of this experience again, next year, hopefully two years on. 01-06 is seriously a great bunch of people. hmm things somehow all seem quite positive haha. thanks guys.
ok lets do a quick recap of GTC:
Day 3
the NPC people started on day 3. day 3 was pretty much the highlight of GTC, because we went to UBIN! yea, hiking in UBIN! how cool is that?
was following a sec 1 patrol, consisting of roy, zi wei, nick kok, randy, wesley. quite lucky, since sec 1 routes were always shorter than sec 2s. sorry sec 2s. and with me i had ben hong and jack, so yea, it was a nice hike. for us, not the trainees... STRESS for them.
For the first checkpoint, they had to find an electrical box in the forest near the road. they were wandering around the side of the road... and there was this big tree with all the wires sticking out practically begging them to choose it. lol. then suddenly, one of them goes 'HEY! Look at this!' We thought they got it, but actually...
'Wah a damn big spider leh!!' LOL. so the three of us just turn our heads towards the wired tree and kept looking that way until the sec 1s caught the hint. haha that still makes me laugh. no offence sec 1s, their skills not that bad, but you have to admit it was preeeetty funny XD
the rest of the day went by, a few mistakes... one of the checkpoints was this stunning scenery of a river... and the weather was picture perfect sia. although it rained a bit... but only in drips and short storms, so we ended on time and then came more fun part. =) SS slacking! we sat. we talked. we ate. we rested.
the best part was when it became dark... at about 8pm. we laid our ponchos down, sat in a circle, talked more cock, listened to radio (muttons to midnight!). tried to watch 'the shooter' on kenneth's omnia, but his battery was running out, so we had to stop... finally, the ones who werent asleep had a mini 'truth' session... not truth or dare, but basically asking each other questions, finding opinions... the game turned into some sort of... yea, blog quiz, like how jack describes it. 'What kind of bag would you be?', 'What would be your one wish?'. and yea, it was pretty fun... the atmosphere was great.
hotel ubin is nice. relaxing. i wish i could stay up just to stare at the sky, listening to the cicadas. anyway i couldn't really sleep... had sentry at 12am with jack, he's a great companion, we just sat/lay there talking a bit, slacking a bit, for one half hour... haha i'll remember that. then came sleep (or trying to sleep)... stupid mosquitoes, stupid sandflies, stupid branch underneath the poncho. grr.
Day 4
woke up nice and early, packed up, and got ready to leave ubin for singapore again. for that day, i was following a sec 2 patrol... lol going to be harder la. actually i was supposed to be at basecamp but was swapped at last moment... in the end turned out to be not so bad after all. heheh. you see why later.
this time, my patrol was lionel, edmund, yang yang, kai jun. J1 was Norris. the first checkpoint was fast, ended up norris and i were lagging behind a bit... but after that, a few hiccups, a few mistakes, ended up their morale was quite low... after embarking on the long long road known as tampines road, it started raining. raining as in thunderstorm raining. sadly the hike was called off. turned out the sec 2 hike wasnt long and tiring at all... it was a pity la, but somewhat relief also... whoo the hike wasn't even half finished and we had about three hours left...
after dinner at J8, went back for batch talks, then off to sleep... but of course we all knew got night call. so we, being good scouts, being prepared, we prepared our inspection layout nicely, folded it nicely in the groundsheet, put it in our bags, slept in half uniform.
yea we are like that. =)
about 4am, night call! we were changed the minute our sentry people reported the j1s had changed to scout u... then haliim came in and told us we had one minute to pack everything and get to the astroturf. lol. thaaanks... but yea we did it, since we were so prepared =D a bit of running around, and after that came inspection. our starting timing was 3 minutes, which was pretty good already, and our final timing was 2.15 which is pretty imba. and we never failed to meet the timing. great job.
after breakfast, more clearing of points, for our batch, led by junjie and wei jie. one task involved climbing stairs up and down to dial macdonald's number: 67773777. foam. i officially hate macdonalds now. think of KFC's number... 62226111. omg what a nice number. another task, caterpillar-crawl and also push-up crawl to leftover breakfast bread and eating it. lol funny.
finally, final horseshoe. 50 pushups, 50 jumping jacks, 50 crunches, 50 squats, 50 crunches, 50 pushups again. all in a row... pretty intense. my fitness has dropped dramatically. after EOYs, after korea, after NPC. can't even do 15 proper push-ups. sian. thankfully after a few restarts, we finished. and so concluded Group Training Camp 2008.
posts were announced after that. i'm the new venture secretary (projects). hmm it wasn't what i asked for, but nonetheless i'm glad i got it. jon ed will definitely do a better job at programmes than me... now that i think about it, i'm happy with my post. it hasnt been a really good year in that i havent really stepped up as i should, so my post is nothing less than i deserve... maybe more. congrats jack, one year in 01 and now he's the VQM! congrats kenneth, hiok, francis, anurak, tak wei, amos.
in KF, nick kok, lingyun, sherman, raga, yang yang got a post. not bad... eashwar, nay myo, try harder next year. if you came for GTC who knows... with your abilities you might have gotten a post. good luck raga, the new KF PL. i'm especially proud of Yang Yang, he really came out this year and he deserves his APL post. nick kok and lingyun, try to have more faith in your abilities. you really can do it. sherman, bye, have fun in kestrel'09. we're going to miss you.
oh right. i'm going to leave KF too.
-sad-
