Sweet Home and Melody

What does 'colleague' mean? 

Honestly, never come across to my mind that I would go holiday or even just go out with colleagues as a real friend and family. I thought I would rather go back home during a long weekend than choose to sacrifice my holiday to go for a 'trip' with colleague

Apparently, our Commodity Structured Trade Ops's (CSTO) department head suggested us to have team bonding session - Trip to Pulau Kukup, Malaysia. He said team bonding is important which make you happy at work.

You'll be surprised that he actually took a real effort to push us to go for a holiday with the money sponsored by himself. He's a type of a very serious boss, yet has his fatherly sense I would say.

Yeah!!! he issued a cheque about SGD 2K sponsoring our one-day trip to KUKUP, Malaysia. Our current department has bout 60 ppl now but only about 18 people went, including myself.

9 of us are youngster around 24-30th, the other 9 are those more experienced and older staffs.

 

Actually it was part of his referral fees when he referred few staffs to our department before he became our department head. But still, he could choose to keep to himself right, but he didn't. I honestly appreciate this much.

So here we go. A one day trip organised by our department CRO (read: Chief Recreational Officer) which really happened.

The tour was started by picking up us at Raffles Place at 6.20am and at Kranji at 6.45am early in the morning. Yes, it is damn early, wake up early in the morning on a public holiday is a pain!

Unfortunately, I woke up late and though they waited for me until 6.30am, and then one suggested me to go to Kranji. It was early in the morning when I was half awake and difficult to get cab and I was kanciong and almost wanted to give up to go. But apparently I received my colleagues' cheering, they assured me that they would wait for me at Kranji there and sincere wish for me to still go.

Oh well, still got another one even much later than me. HENG.....at least got one accompany me late. lol

Cut the story short, we managed to go to Malaysia with a little jam coz it was already about 7.40am when we wanted to passed the Singapore custom at Woodland. Honestly I just fell asleep at the bus. The bus is too big for us so each of us sit by our self occupying two seats.

Our first stop at Malaysia was having a prata breakfast then followed by visiting a chocolate shop and pineapple museum. What interesting here was we were offered to see the pineapple farm and eat the fresh pineapple 'Josepine', but they didn't sell the pineapple...

We then continued to the fishing village and had seafood lunch at Kukup Restaurant. Honestly nothing special about it so far, nor anything bad about it.

Then come next after lunch was free time at the shopping mall, for only 2 hour!!! We split into two groups, one group wanted to eat durian and shopping, and other wanted to do some activities;

 

Alright, so my group wanted to play 'Escape' game. We were so excited but sadly no available slot until 6pm...we end up went for snacking. So, next although with our half full stomach, we had our THAI dinner - which actually ended our one-day tour.

In short, the trip was basically just about eating, sleeping (in the bus), and shopping. and of course chatting with each others.

The overall trip was ok to me, nothing much special. But it's the POST-TRIP activities which were so fun to me. Back to Singapore, some of us went back home to take their cars to get ready to stay late for our post trip activities!  

Total 8 of us (youngster of course) decided to continue for ESCAPE game 'LOST SG' at Dhobby Ghaut at 10pm. We played escape for theme 'prison break'. We were basically was locked in 3 different prison and found a way to escapes. It was wrapped in such an intelligent and pretty such that the game looks very high tech and challenging yet so much fun. It's around $27. We were actually introduced to this by our lovely couple in our department, Janice and Terence -  escapers' PRO who had finished all the 6 escape theme here.

 

It is not the end yet. In spite of being tired, we still continued to PLAYNATION until bout 2am. Again.. it's very fun! Some of us play wii, some of us busy dancing... 

Alright it's basically the end of the day at 3am - I bathed and slept at 3am and only woke up at 12pm and continued to sleep again until 3pm on the next day

 Regardless, it was indeed a full of excitement day on labor day!!!  

As times goes by, I realise my colleagues are becoming friends and family to me. We enjoy complaining about work yet still enjoying our days somehow. I enjoy going out and having fun with them.