About Bonding & Bootcamp

Bali... Bonding sessions. Bootcamp. Beach towels. Booze fests.

3 days, 2 plane rides and a blink of an eye later, I'm back from our agency weekend retreat in Bali.

"How was it?" I hear you ask... Well... It was good. It was bad. It was crazy. It was relaxed. It was fun. It was boring. It was every 1 of those things rolled into an insane 48 hours.

DAY 1 - FRIDAY, MAY 13, 2005

Bloody early blastoff...

6.30am: Tumbled out of bed and into the bathroom, where I managed to keep awake long enough not to drown as I showered.
7.15am: Stumbled into a cab and tried to ignore the driver's incessantly chirpy chitter chatter for the next 25 minutes.
7.40am: Assembled at Changi Airport, T2, Row 4... Blurry-minded, sleepy-eyed and dying for a smoke.
8.20am - 9.15am: Wandered around DFS buying hordes of liquor and cigarettes. Chugged down a mocha latte while sucking on a cigarette at the Sunflower Garden smoking area.
9.35am: Took off. Spent the next 1.5 hours playing Super Mario World 3 and not eating the omelette the airline tried to pass off as food.
12.20pm: Touched down. Spent the next 45 minutes getting through dwaddling guards at Immigration and Customs.

Bonding sessions and bootcamp...

1.40pm: Arrived at Club Med Bali, Nusa Dua. (After spending 25 minutes enroute with a very sweaty tour guide! Eeewww... Hasn't this chap heard of the invention the rest of us called anti-perspirant?)
1.45pm: Got a rousing welcome from the staff and a lukewarm speech from the Village Director before we were led off to our rooms. Jas and I were in 3105, which was slightly better than Missduhr's room, which turned out to be a brisk 10 minute walk from the lobby.
2.30pm: Gobbled down some semblance of lunch at 1 of the resort's 3 restaurants.
3.30pm: Recongregated at the amphitheatre after hacking the sleeves and neckline off my agency-designed t-shirt, which had evidently been designed for hobbits and the 7 dwarfs.
3.45pm - 6.10pm: Played a series of "team games" organized by Club Med, which included all the usual activities I seem to recall from my primary school sports days. I thought I'd left the bunny hopping relays behind after I passed my PSLE... God, was I wrong!
6.15pm: Took a quick 30-minute dip in the pool, before hurrying back to the room to bathe and change for dinner.
7.30pm - 9.50pm: Fought off the yawns that threatened to dislocate my jaw as dinner dragged on and on... And on and on and on and o-o-o-Zzzzzzzzzzzz...
10pm: Found myself looking incredulously at Jas as we watched the resort's in-house actors/dancers massacre Michael Flatley's "Lord of the Dance".

Beddy bye bye...

10.30pm: Snuck back to haven 3105. Did not, however, manage to escape the Big Boss' demand to down an entire mug of beer... Which resulted in me burping beer for the next 2 hours. Ick.
12.15am or so: Fell asleep with the TV on, which probably wasn't as funny as Jas snoozing with the remains of her black cherry lollipop next to her pillow. :P

Heh... Ok, apparently, even after a 2-hour nap, I'm more tired than I thought. Let's just sum it up and say that the 1st day of Bali could have been a million times better than it was. The team games were juvenile in nature, and I seriously doubt they did anything but prove what arseholes some of the big guys were. I mean, you'd think that upper management would act their age, instead of behaving like 15yo boys with a chip on their shoulder and a major need to prove something, wouldn't you?

I also hated the way everything was so damn organized and timed. It felt more like a damn bootcamp than the holiday we were promised. Day 2 just couldn't get any worse, right? Hah... Details coming up in my next post... With photos! (Which I'll post up as soon as I consolidate everything we took! :P)