non-sailing moments

I was not thinking of blogging today but I was just looking at the calendar and realised that the round the worlders have left Singapore for their last training and also pre-race preparation. On 18 September in Liverpool, all the boats will be flagged off for the race. It's all happening too soon. It just daunted on me that 6 months had flown by just like this. Memories of the first press conference announcing the 21 STB sponsored crew were still fresh in my mind.

Mike's call on Friday and looking at the latest photo album shared by Shin Shin also brought back my memories of training too. He brought back latest gossips for us too. He did the 3 part trainings in 3 separate occasions unlike myself and group that I went with. We did the crazy 3-weeks back-to-back at one go. Mike was in my part B training and he was the one who brought the Singapore's Yeo's can curry and rendang for us. After one week of training, we missed our food so badly. All thanks to him that we had some local flavours to our English meals.

Where food is closest to our heart in our culture... it's tough to eat eggs, bacon, sausages, sandwiches and pasta all the time. The 'ang mos' probably thought the bunch of Singaporeans are mad when we are always talking about food. They probably didn't realise the food culture here. Well... being singapore ambassadors, our job is to promote Singapore and we started with food. In the last part of our training, we were the only boat that had the most interesting meals. In this training, all the Singaporeans and 'Uniquely Singapore' international based crew were sailing and living together for one week. We had lots of fun cooking our meals. Too many creations to remember but the best that we ever had was mediterranean rice with vege curry and naan. This was the last meal that we cooked at the end of training.

Besides the food, we've probably created a reputation of being party animals and a crazy bunch of crew. The funny things is we never really joined the rest of the other crew in pubs to drink bt we still had that reputation... What I can is that... we drank quite a lot amongst ourselves. We gossiped a lot, chatted and massaged.

In fact, we probably had lots of reputation already... one being the only Asian boat; two being small in size compared to the big ang mos; three being a team that comprised of more females than the other boats (I'm not sure of the exact ratio of genders in the other boats but it does look like Singapore have more females onboard at least for some legs)... and more reputations to be created as we sail...who knows???!!!

The hottest gossip now is that we have a couple within the team now....yes, so it's kindda become SDU too... and it's probably the first and the last... or have I spoke to soon?