Friday, March 30, 2007

Seven eleven

First post of the backposting.

Today we finally had the long-awaited official CG11 outing. Apparently over the 1+ year of our group's existence we had never had a proper outing outside of lunch trips to Wee Nam Kee for chicken rice and maybe Chinatown market for lunch after forensic patho. Closest we came to it was a lunch trip to Manhattan Fish Market at Plaza Sing after the Coroner's Court posting to celebrate J's birthday, but we had to rush back to HSA for lectures after that.

I wouldn't say it was at all easy to organise this and for a few moments it seemed as if everything was going to fall apart because we were having considerable difficulty getting a day where all 8 members were free to meet for lunch (very hard to fit the schedules of our very busy CG members heh), and frankly I was on the verge of giving up. In the end I just decided on the day where most people seemed to be free, and as chance would have it things fell into place and all 8 of us managed to make it. The feeling of seeing plans bear fruit when you think they are going to fall apart, it's a rather amazing thing.

We met at Miramar Hotel for the dim sum lunch buffet at Orient Ocean Restaurant. Turns out the restaurant is in the same chain as Dragon Gate, where my JC class had a gathering some years ago (also arranged by me o_O;). The dim sum was not too bad, especially some of the fried items, though certain dishes tasted peculiar, particularly the sweet and sour pork which tasted like it had been fried in lemon detergent.

The joke of the day arose from my rather unfortunate overestimation of the appetites of our CG members, and also from poor information gathering. The dim sum items were coming rather slowly in the beginning and were rapidly polished off, thus we thought we should probably order in greater quantities to match the rate of consumption, without thinking that some members (the girls particularly) were already getting full. The end result was that I ordered 7 baskets of chee cheong fun and 4 baskets of xiao long bao. I have a totally rational explanation for the 7 baskets of chee cheong fun - each basket only contains 2 small rolls, and we had only ordered one basket up to that point in time, with widespread opinion being that we should order more; I estimated that each person could comfortably eat 2 chee cheong fun, so 1 basket per person minus the one we had already ordered gives 7 baskets lor.

The miscalculation was somewhat disastrous as mere moments after the order was placed we found ourselves realising that we were already quite full from all the starchy dim sum items and the thought of 7 baskets of chee cheong fun was, as you can imagine, nightmarish. Thankfully when we asked the waitress if we could cancel the order, she knowingly explained that she had only placed an order for 3 baskets, since she knew that we could never possibly finish 7 baskets. That's good service for you heh. We still had a lot of trouble finishing the food that had already arrived at the table, but I didn't feel uncomfortably full at the end, so I guess it was okay for me. Yar my apologies to everyone who felt overstuffed at the end.

Anyway, no thanks to my fateful order, jokes flew every which way about Qi Long (7 baskets), most of them too embarrassing to yours truly to repeat here. Haha. Photos can be seen on XL's LJ.

After lunch it started to pour, which severely limited our available plans. XL graciously agreed to let us crash her house, and 6 of us (excluding D and P) spent the rest of the afternoon playing this card game that WM had brought along, 6 nimmt (6 takes, or as we call it, the "cow game"). It's one of my favourite games because of its simplicity and unpredictability. It involves playing one card each round from those in your hand, each card having a number value, and the cards are then arranged in rows according to numerical value; when a row exceeds five cards in length all the cards will be given to the person whose played card caused the row to "overflow". Seems rather complicated when you explain it like that. The aim is to receive as few cards as possible at the end of the round. Equal parts strategy and luck, with a whole load of unpredictability that depends on the strategies of the people you're playing with, and the result is endless fun, at least for a few hours.

The day was pretty fun, even with all the Qi Long jokes, haha, and yeah, I'm going to miss this CG, for the fun we had during our postings, especially sitting around during lunch and talking rubbish. Everyone's now worried about who will be in their new CG in M5 (after all, it is final year) and I'm no exception.

Avaris / 3/30/2007 06:12:00 PM

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