Life @ Poly Forum
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
poly forum 2009 sub theme 4.
with the April 2009 semester out of the way, I will move on to the things that have been keeping me busy during the holidays.
the first would be the Polytechnic Forum 2009, which the school of BA sent me for from the 7th till 17th September this year.
there is also an opening ceremony on July 25th but I cant attend due to the ECD bazaar so lets skip that.
my initial impression of poly forum would be an extremely long event where we will do research on boring things (erosion of cultural identity! is this IAC or what?) with a free trip to JB on the second week.
in the end it is still a lot of boring research in the first week, but the second week was more interesting than expected.
the first week from 7th to 11th September is what they call the "Pre-Forum" week, where we collect information to collate during the JB stay.
there and four sub-themes (meaning they do research on different things, like recession, rich-poor divide, erosion of cultural identity etc). while most teams had excursions, site visits, talks and movie viewings lined up for them, poor subtheme 4 had to work within even smaller subgroups and think of where we want to visit to know more about cultural erosion.
the topic we had to start with is already so vague, but luckily we eventually worked it out and we decided to look at food and hawker fare and how young people dowan to take over or something like that.
so we interviewed older hawkers and patrons at Chinatown, Old Airport Road and some other places, while finding stalls that are not opened at some market around Shenton Way (no not Maxwell).
it is extremely IAC as we went around all these places filming people while interviewing them with questions that we came up with ourselves. and this continued from tuesday to thursday so you can imagine how tiring those few days were for us.
it is along this week that I met nice people from other polys whom I collaborated with over that week and the one after that. people like peijun, junwei, qing hui and farhan (unfortunately he moved to another working group in JB so didnt manage to stay in close contact).
friday was a collation day. for us we shared our findings at the LT18B assigned to us. its a little old and inaccessible I must say LOL. then came all the talk about us not moving in the right direction, looking at things only physically but not mentally and blahblah. then we are broken into working groups: presentation, multimedia, research and collaterals.
I am in collaterals together with quite a few of them. it turned out to be the group with the most people with the easiest but most tedious work. more discussions ensued on friday and we eventually decided to make paper cutouts of some traditional costumes, with one side for them to write what makes them singaporean and the other for them to keep as a bookmark. this ends the first week.
the second week is known as the "Residential Week" or something. we checked in at Pulai Springs Resort of JB. heard it is famous for its golf courses, but unfortunately golf courses are off limits for us.
we began work on the decorative boards on which we will hang the costume cutouts with the visitors' messages, which includes esplanade, chinatown shophouses and HDB flats. I have taken quite a few photos that I will show another time.
we also worked on cutting out all that costumes (all 500 of them) and on pasting the descriptions. that took most of monday and tuesday and a little of wednesday morning.
so by wednesday afternoon we had plenty of time to just slack around. but the slacking doesnt just start on wednesday. every night in Pulai Springs is an excitement.
monday night we met some of the people who are in our working group, namely titimah, meiqi, jezebelle and natalie. went over to their room with qing hui, junwei and peijun and watched teebee. criminal minds I think. forgot if they played any cards but probably didnt cos I think they slept early. see my memory is failing me so soon. so we just watched teebee and went back to our rooms.
at my room (is it 524? SHIT I FORGOT THE NUMBER) I talked to my dorm-mates for the next 3 days, darrell (he will be closer to us as the days go by), liqian, zhangkai, qing hui and... the alien dude (sorry!), chatted a while on MSN with melissa before sleeping.
the internet there can go suck my balls. there are 5 accounts per subtheme but not only is it slow, we keep getting disconnected because there is some limit on the number of users at once. some more internet access is sold at RM50 for 24 hours usage, which can only be shared by a few people. considering we are only back in our rooms at night it just isnt worth it. and so everyone had plenty of fun struggling to use whatever little bandwidth they could get.
second night they started playing card games proper, after watching Fated to Love You on Channel U of course. its like a daily rite of passage. they played some uno, then some dai dee, eventually they moved on to heart attack, but you have to copy the action of the person doing heart attack before putting your hands down.
at first it started with simple monkey faces but the actions got increasingly elaborate, with running around touching corners of the rooms, hitting people and spinning rounds. you can watch a video of it on my facebook, where I got hit. that happened on the 3rd day, where people like darrell, sean, dominic, zhangkai and his girlfriend had joined us.
it is one of the main games they play, and as usual I am being the audience and just watching along haha. they also played polar bear. it is a game too complicated to explain and I shall not bother, but its interesting enough.
thats how we spent most of the nights, with them playing games like these and me watching (lol). I did join towards the end la.
the 3rd day afternoon darrell and singya and I ventured out of Pulai Springs to the shopping centres nearby because its too boring. the rest of them went swimming I think.
we visited JUSCO of Taman Universiti and the shopping centre near it as well. forgot its name haha. its just pretty plain walking and looking around, and darrell stocking up hell a lot of groceries even though its the last day with my egging until he dulan at me LOL.
on the cab that we took on our way back, I noticed the meter isnt running (which is pretty common) so I simply asked him 5 ringgits? darrell heard it as 5 minutes. in the end the driver said something like errrrrrrrrrrr I try, looking very distressed. later on we realised that we sounded like we are threatening him by telling him to reach Pulai Springs in 5 minutes with 5 ringgits. oh well~
day 4 afternoon we were back in SP for the closing ceremony that will take place in the evening. its quite an uneventful time spent, just walking around and eating and a little bit of talking. didnt visit moberly in the end unfortunately.
closing ceremony was nothing special except for listening to (admittedly rather boring) presentations. the highlight is the dialogue with Minister for Community, Youth and Sports Vivian Balakrishnan (what a mouthful), where there is this EXTREMELY unhappy SP dude with all the
then later on an extremely PLP poly dude who rebutted what he said, saying there are still plenty of opportunities around the world and everything. drama.
since then I had an outing with the poly forum people, with a BBQ/chalet coming up soon! woot cant wait.
I intended to post about Leo Fusion actually, but its not over yet. so I think I will (hopefully) write about that when it ends this weekend.
