I joined this program (to work for 6 flags) by my lonesome self and i was really frightened at the prospect of not knowing anyone in the same program as me. Hence, from the mass emails the company sent, i copied their email adds and emailed them a hello note. Thank goodness several of them replied. 2 of them were Yujen and Cheeyen. I'll forever be grateful to them for befriending me despite not knowing who i was! We had to sit together for 33 hours to get to houston, so in that time, we got to know each other more!

Im not sure when the nickname started.. but Cheeyen and i soon started calling each other "kaki" and it has stuck till today.

Kaki and me... then

Kaki and me now

And then of course there was Jinyu.. who travelled to New York with us. I like this photo very much. It was taken during the first week within meeting each other and yet this photo manages to capture the chemistry between us!

So Us then..

Us Now..

After working in the program, 7 of us took off to visit Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Francisco etc together. Here's one of us in Disneyland then..

Here's one of us now.

They were saying that none of us have changed very much. I tink i prob wud win "The one who changed the most". Just because of my braces and hair colour.

It was fun meeting up. These past few months, i have been regretting my 1st 2 years in NUS. This get-together was a nice reminder of how i had the time of my life then!

All those nights together

Are a special memory

And I can't wait for tomorrow

Just as long as you're dancing next to me

Well.. i figured tt since i was lookin into my archives, i might as well post the memories here. (plus i dont wanna do dissertation!)

We stayed at Holly Hall, a cluster of apartments.

Beautiful place isn't it? :D

I stayed with the guys and Kaki in apartment 603.

Here's the living room with yujen comfortably in one sofa (as you can tell.. we re arranged the furniture quite a bit). Guys arent really very messy at all. They were picking up after me more than i picked up after them!

Can you see the dining room near yujen? (Yes i was trying to take photos while rotating ard.)

The dining area was the community area where we would sit down to a nice meal after a hard's day work... and then spend the next few mins complaining abt the workload/ talking abt the day's events/ planning the next outing.

In this photo, you can see that Cheeyen is wearing blue while Ian and Jinyu are wearing green shirts. Cheeyen was in retail while Ian, Jinyu and i were in food service (there wasnt enough places for retail when we arrived!). Hence the different uniforms. Food service had to wear a cap too, which would explain why Jinyu is wearing one in this photo.

This photo is to show how cute i am! :D haha! Nah.. im just kidding. It's to show the kitchen behind me!

in which Cheeyen would cook lovely meals for us! hahahah! wonderful, delicious food! On our off days, we would travel to the nearest grocery market to lug back bags of groceries while cheeyen would plan the meals! It was a huge pity when she moved out for a bit. I have to confess tt when she moved out, i was a bit aprehensive.. esp when i wondered whether the guys were expecting me to cook for them! hahaha!

Okay.. from the dining area, you can see this corridor.. The door you see leads to a bathroom.

If you turn left at the bathroom, you'll see the room Richard and Yujen share (which has a walk in wardrobe and its own bathroom).

If you turn right at the bathroom, it'll be the room where Ian, Jinyu, Hanwei and i shared! And no, the yellow and blue one is not my bed.. Mine is comfortably enclosed by the two beds.. See the mattress in the middle??? :D tt's mine! Every day, Jinyu and Ian would wake up first while i begged for more sleep (the 3 of us worked the 8am - 11 pm shift so there was very little sleep). And to wake me up, Jinyu would have to stand at the foot of my bed going "Adeline.. adeline... we are gonna be late...." upon which i would shriek and rush to get ready! Meanwhile, they would prepare breakfast for us to eat before we set out for work.

And here's our 603 family! Houston wouldnt have been so fun if not for them! :D :D Seriously, besides being such awesome company, they would look after me, look out for me and do all kinds of sweet things (like not letting me do any housework, mark my page when i had fallen asleep while reading a book)... we had really good times there!

What was amazing about these guys was that they can cook! :D After Cheeyen left, i had the pleasure of having 5 guys cook for me while i happily relaxed... in short, i was indeed the pampered princess! hahaha!

Besides having my breakfast and dinner cooked for me by 5 wonderful guys, Hanwei helped to cook my lunch! He wanted to pack his own lunch to work when he realised tt the portions wud always be too big (cause the chicken thighs they sell over there are huge!). Hence i would help him cook (by "help" i mean "mostly hanging ard the kitchen chit chatting to him till he finished or washing up the dishes after he did the preparation work") and then during my work shift the next day, i wud grab my lunch set from him. :D :D

Ahhh.. Good times indeed. My lunch provider!

As i said, we went off to work early. We had to report at 8 so by 7.30 we were out of the house on our bikes!

We would ride to the nearest subway and then ride into the subway train to the next stop.. Something we'll never do in Singapore! haha!

Hey! It was a pretty long walk from holly hall to the station (min 20 mins) and then from the subway station to the amusement park staff entrance(at least 25 mins)!

I worked in the restaurant with the theme of the Medieval English, "Sword and Crown".

Duties varied from attending the cashier..

To tending another store by your lonesome self (I loved this duty because there wasnt any supervisor ard to look over ur shoulder and you could slack off when there werent any customers. And no one else liked it so i started doing it more after a while! :D)

The duty i loathed the most was this one. The cart duty. We had to take heavy boxes filled with soda bottles out from the cold freezer, load it up in the cart, pour ice into it and then stand in the hot sun (with nothing but one measly umbrella) for 6 hours straight selling drinks. The worse part was the heat, followed by having to plunge your hand repeatedly into the cold ice to get the drink customers want.. and of course there was no calculator so if the customers ordered 4 different drinks of different prices( which were irritatingly priced at $2.75 etc), you're basically screwed. That was the only time in my life my brain worked so fast with numbers!

There was 2 other duties but im too lazy to upload the photos. One was preparing the food which i disliked for many reasons. I got scalded twice doing tt, once in the face and once on the arms. The other was selling ice cream which i loved because... 1) air con.. 2) ICE CREAM!!! and the prices were easy to work with ($2.50, $3.00, $4.00) so my brain didnt have to work as hard!

Cart Duty

The worst part of the day was closing shift. Because i had to wash the dishes most of the time. And by dishes, i mean these.

It was terrible because i kept on getting cuts on my hands from the stupid metal corners. And the water and sink were pretty disgusting. I tink my whining abt my job duties was one of the reasons why the 603 guys were really nice to me (During one discussion, we realised tt i had the worst job duties!).

Here's one photo with my colleagues there. Also, one of the rare times im caught on film wearing a cap. Most days, i would wear tt cap when i was just about to enter the restaurant. Once we were off work, the cap wud be whipped off asap!

Work was admittedly tough. But we had loads of fun to make up for it. For starters, we were allowed to enter 6 flags free on our off days! So we managed to ride most of the rides.. 6 flags is known for their rollercoasters. All of their rollercoasters have a turn to make you go upside down. I was a scary cat when i went there.. afraid of rollercoasters (ever since the Viking).. But after one ride, i was happily rushing to experience more! Here's a sample of 6 flags astroworld used to look like (it closed down)

Being cheapo chinese, we took photos of the tvs showing our photos whcih was snapped when we came down the terrifying part of the rollercoasters. Haha!Only asians would tink of this method!

And here's a random pic of a hot(?) guy to reward you for looking thru this post! I forgot his name but he was a friend of Cheeyen's. He was working as a lifeguard whcih explains his wet hair.

There were the house parties the other staff organised. Like us, they were foreigners in USA. There were Thais, Columbians, French, Slovakians and i tink one was from Czech Republic. Cant remember them all.

6 flags also organised excursions for us to enjoy. We went to NASA (as we were in Houston, Texas).

We didnt understand the hype for it. Well.. if you are befuddled by the info, what else can you do but start posing for photos?

6 flags also brought us to Kebah where the sea was amazingly blue. I loved the whole boardwalk idea.

This is the only photo i have of David! He's the one in Red. He's a Singaporean too but somehow our paths never really did meet.

Here's another hot guy whose name i kinda forgot. Everyone said he was cute but i dunnoe.. He seemed a bit skinny. Well, you can be the judge.

We had the fortune to be in San Antonio for the NBA Finals game. It was deffo the coolest day of my life. There were spurs posters everywhere.. with people proclaimin their loyalty to them everywhere!

Every moment was simply.. fantastic. It was an emotional ride because they were neck to neck the whole time. Once the game started, i was out of my seat and screaming my support all the way! Here's the starting of the ceremony.

They had screens every where.. When the opposing team had the ball, they would flash funny animated messages encouraging us to chant "defense". If im not wrong, the "Make noise" message was for the time when a player from the opposing team had to concentrate.

Unfortunately, despite my heart and soul being poured into supporting them, the spurs lost by a few points! Here's one of us after the game... Hanwei is obviously heart broken over the loss.

We managed to catch the Houston's baseball team playing. I had to have Jinyu explain to me how the game works.

On another day, we went back to San Antonio where support for the Spurs were still very evident( By then, the Spurs had already won the NBA).

We went to San Antonio's waterwalk where it felt like everything was out of a storybook.

Our preview of San Francisco's Golden Bridge

More evidence of how shamelessly unabashed we were to make fools of ourselves in public.

We ate a lot of Fast Food. Besides the discounted meals we had at 6 flags, we went to BK.. (psst.. can u see the star wars ads on the cups? heh. we managed to catch tt movie there too!)

There was Denny's which remains my absolute fav fast food outlet!

After 6 flags, 7 of us left on a tour. First stop: LA

Jinyu at the Sunset Boulevard

Mann's Chinese Theatre

Disneyland's Small world

It was their 50th Anniversary then so they had many collages such as the following one all ard the themepark.

Can you believe that this collage was made up of photos of pple who took them in disneyland? Simply Amazing.

More hamming it up for the cam

Disney's Castle of Dreams

Can you see how crowded the place was? Thank goodness i remembered some info from some guidebook my dad had borrowed for our previous trip here! Thanks to those tips, we managed to get onto most of the rides..

I like the closeness seen in this pic.

San Diego's Seaworld. We were quite tired at this stage.

Las Vegas was another place we toured. By the time we could tour The Strip, we were pretty exhausted. Someone in the grp made a strong case for us to finish walking The Strip so by the time we reached the end, exhaustion was evident in everyone. Here's some pics from the start of The Strip!

Grand Canyon

San Francisco.

Herst's Castle

Golden Bridge Gate

On the tour boat that would bring us to the under the Golden Bridge, Liyu got so cold, she was literally shivering and her teeth were chattering. We got so worried tt we wrapped her with our jackets!

Fisherman's Wharf

Museum of Fine Arts

Lourve Road. claims to be the shortest road in the world.

San Francisco has super steep slopes. No wonder all the residents have nice shapely legs!

A jump shot. And honestly, it's so unfair tt Yujen is always the highest one in any shot! Look at the show off with his 2 legs obviously in the air. No fair!

Oh dear..the order of pics are in a mess.. but among other places, we went to Universal Studios.

Love this shot.

Im supposed to be pretending tt im gonna fall off the bike but Jinyu is smiling as if he is willing me to fall off. hmph.

After touring other places (whcih im too lazy to post all the pics up here), Jinyu, Cheeyen and i parted ways from them to fly to New York. We went to Buffalo without a single plan. Where we would put our bags while we went to see the falls (we would only be there for less than a day so a hotel room was out of the question), how to get to the falls.. etc. We didnt even have a map when we landed in New York!

We had the shock of our lives when we were told tt they didnt keep luggage in the airports anymore due to the terrorist attack. So there we were, totting ard with our suitcase and bags.. Thankfully the bus station people took pity on us and helped us to safekeep our bags (after checking thru our luggage first of course).

First, we went to Buffalo to see the Niagara Falls which was pretty spectacular.. Made Yosemite Park's waterfall look so small in comparison!

It was so windy up there! Here's a pic of Jinyu holding his jacket to show you how strong the wind was!

We went down to have a closer look at the falls. The raincoat they give..... is no protection against the water. As shown by this pic.

Next stop was New York, New York! By this time, i was dead broke. Seriously, my budget was Us$20 per day! Hence, we had to walk ard the whole of New York City. Not once did we take the subway. Gosh! I tink we lost quite a lot of weight then!

This bull is the most abused statue i have ever seen.

Because we were on a tight budget, we ended up eating the same old meal every day. We would go to Wendy's where we would each order one baked potato with a free cup of water.

Here's a pic of our meal. Sometimes i got so hungry, i would even eat up the potato skin! I distinctly remember the moment of sheer desperation where i tore salt packets to eat the grains of salt inside!

Here are our cups of water. Thank goodness for Mcdonald's free cups of water. If we could not finish drinking them, we would pour them into Jinyu's water bottle in order to ensure that there wud always be water for later.

I remember tt after tt trip, we made a pact.. we would go back to New York City again.. this time.. with money!

wow. recapping tt hols sure took longer than i anticpated.. well it was fun lookin back at the times we had. Wish i cud experience it all over again. Went into this adventure by myself and somehow, i must have done something right because i got myself more friends and a memory of a fantastic summer holiday. :D

Cause it's so clear

Every year

We get stronger

What's gone is gone

The past is the past

Turn the radio up

And then hit the gas

Cause . . .I know we've Come So Far

But we've Got So Far To Go

I know the road seems long

But it won't be long 'till it's time to go

So, most days we'll take it fast

And some nights lets take it slow

I know we've Come So Far

But babyWe've Got So Far To Go

Hey old friend, together

Side by side and year by year

The road was filled with twists and turns

Oh but that's the road that got us here

Let's move past the bad times

But before those memories fade

Let's forgive but not forget

And learn from the mistakes we made

Cause it's so clear

Every year

We get stronger

So shine that light

Take my hand

And let's dance into tomorrow land

-Hairspray's Come so Far-