Wonderful Wide World

Everyone after the closing ceremony

This post will be dedicated to the 8th ASEAN Cultural Youth Forum which was held in National University of Singapore, Singapore from 7th to 12th June 2010. So to start offmy experience, I did not quite volunteer myself to join this forum as I need to work. But after asking around, we still can't get anyone so I decided to leave my job (for one week) and sign up for this forum. My initial mindset was it'll just be another of your average camp. Everybody will be assigned into a group with all the cheers and stuff. But slowly I realised I was wrong.

First of all, this forum was not like any other camp. Just judge by our accomodation and you'll know the difference. We, for one whole week, stayed in Prince George's Park Residence in NUS. This residence deemed to be the most high class on-campus accomodation of all and in deed it is. Our room is a single, en-suite room, with your own toilet, air-condition and only you. Next, it comes to food. Normal camp will have packed mixed rice, but ours is buffet spread after buffet spread with various ASEAN cuisine (we even have sausage mcmuffin for breakfast haha). Well definitely no cheers and the most interesting part is, we have a lot of free time! (well that's not the important part).

The theme this year is "City, Traditiona and Technology". For opening ceremony, we witness how different countries merged their traditional dance with modern musics, or how technology could be used to improve the aesthetic values of their different dances. For NTU, since the school chose our dance club, we performed Latin dance. No link to tradition. But if you think harder, you'll realise that Singapore is a cosmopolitan city, an international hub. And people around are getting more and more interested to social and ballroom dancing. So, we are potraying the modern side of Singapore(Crap!) Hahaha. Anyway, we have people from different universities of ASEAN countries. It was so interesting chatting with people from a different world and a different culture. If it's not for this forum, I wouldn't know that in Philippines, it is a norm to have a driver to drive you around. If it's not for this forum, I would't know that Thais are great dancers. If it's not for this forum, I wouldn't know how friendly people are (although for some nationalities, we have problem communicating in English). And I wouldn't have known the history of Singapore and I wouldn't have the chance to make so many new friends:D

For the closing ceremony, two universities will be paired up to come up with a performance. We need to incorporate all the things we learnt (the technology part) into our traditional performances. We were paired up with Vietnam National University, Hanoi. They were really sweet people. Friendly and helpful too. We end up doing the Vietnamese bamboo dance with five different types of songs (Chinese, English, Tamil, Malay, and Vietnamese). We even add in some acting. We thought our performance was quite playful and the feed back from organizers were good. They said our performance was very relax and refreshing. Hahaha...But the Vietnamese were so sweet. The girls even gave us their traditional hat as souvenirs. :D

The five days to me was too short. I hope the others could stay longer in Singapore. Now that I flashback, I hope I could still be in PGPR, with all of them. I wish we could still walk around together, chat with each other about our own country and culture. All of it was so fun. But it ended. I am back to reality and back to work(new internship!). I hope I could meet all of them again. I promised myself that I will go over to their countries to visit them when I have the ability. It's such and eye opening event and thank god for "forcing" me to sign up. If not, I'll missed all the fun:D

P/S: We even get to learn how to do Noh(Japanese traditional dance), Wayang Wong and Beijing Opera!