On the 16th December, Pippi flew in from Australia and arrived at our home late at night. It's been years since we've seen her; I last saw her in 2005 and I was one of the last few people to have seen her in our family. It's great having a friend over, and we're hosting her at our house on her "round-the-world" trip, after the 3 times we've stayed over at her family's house. Our families are family friends. My holidays with them were one of the best holidays ever. Nothing can replace them.
Let me see. What did I do on the 17th? I don't remember! I think I took Pippi out to the MRT station and got her an EZ-link card, and brought her to eat Roti Prata and visit our primary school. Ah yes, that was what we did. The security guard wouldn't let us walk around in the school despite us being ex-students, so we walked to the roti prata stall for lunch, for we timed ourselves to be there when it was emptier and we were hungry. She missed roti prata and had 2 plates of plain prata and I had one plate of plain chapati which I couldn't finish and the curry, it was too spicy for me since I have low tolerance for spiciness.
On the 18th, it was the RJ invites, my first fencing competition. I didn't keep my distance; I kept going too close to the opponents, thinking that was how near I needed to be to hit them, and got too close such that they kept hitting me. Sad to say, but it was expected, I lost all my bouts in the poules stage and didn't move on to Direct E. Worse, I was 40th place out of 41 competitors, beating the last competitor only by the number of hits I made on the opponent. Now I know, and have learnt the hard way. I will do better next time (if there is a next time, for I might be overseas on JDP)!
I lent out my spare wire to the SMSS girl who didn't bring a spare wire and her wire failed. If I didn't lend her, she wouldn't have been able to compete, and that would be a heartbreaker no? She made it into the next round.
I stayed behind to cheer on Flo, Celeste, Cheryl, Angie and K. Aerene managed to win one of her bouts in her poule but still was eliminated. Celeste was the final seed who made it into the next round, and lost 14-14 in the table of 32 by a coin toss. Oww.. but that was really great of Celeste. We rookies had only 2 months of training effectively, and Celeste fenced against the 4th seed who has had 4 years experience. But then again, seed doesn't matter. The thing about fencing is that the years of experience and seed don't fix the outcome in competitions, it's how you fence that matters.
K made it to round of 16 I think, and he was also 14-14 but lost in the last 5 seconds to the opponent he had lost to twice in past competitions. Owww....
Cheryl made it to round of 16 or 8 but lost. Flo was eliminated at round of 32. Angie, we are proud to say, won the Silver medal in girl's foil. :D
After that, Flo, Celeste and I had dinner together. We had a good time doing girl-talk. The only thing was that the environment wasn't all girls so people were giving me weird looks for I talked too loudly... We talked until 7.45pm then went our ways. I found out the next day that there was a faster and cheaper route home, and was happy to have found it at last.
The next day morning, my mum's friend who is our neighbour down the road took her sisters, Pippi, MT, Lucky, Nicky(it's not spelt Nikki right? for he's a boy) and I out for a walk at ECP. Pippi wanted to go to east coast for she used to go there a lot when she stayed near there while she was here, and had eaten at the hawker centre there often.
We let the 2 dogs off the leash, for Nicky was USUALLY quite an obedient well-trained dog, and Lucky was guai, so Lucky followed Nicky around and Nicky "led the way" in front of the group. It was so cute seeing the two doggies walking around being curious, and Lucky's way of walking, with his backside shaking like that, and that Lucky was already a cute-looking dog, so cute!!!!
We reached the hawker centre and fortunately there was a satay stall open. Pippi and I had satay for dinner already within the past few days from KM's friend's bbq stayover, but who goes to ECP for leisure to eat at the hawker centre without eating satay? I had fishball noodles (duh), chin chao that had icecream soda(yuck), and MT had hokkien mee, and my mum's friend's sister had nice duck rice whose stall had a long queue.
We then walked for a bit more, and Nicky was naughty for he chased a cat up a tree and didn't listen to my mum's friend's commands and went to say hi to others who didn't want to be disturbed by him. So we leashed him for the rest of the walk.
My mum's friend then dropped me off at RJ to support the boys foil indiv. Some of them had already been eliminated, for the competition at the poules stage was already tough. Cheryl was also fencing epee indiv that day. It was disgusting when YL and Khai had to fence each other in the round of 16; it meant only one of them could make it to the round of 8. 3 of the boys made it to round of 8, but no one got a medal. K again came so close to winning at 14-8/9 but the opponent caught up so quickly and kept hitting at him, and K lost oh so barely. double oww... I didn't know how to console him. I really felt the pain too but not as intense as K himself definitely but I couldn't empathise, (*could I?*).
I'm proud to say again, we received another medal, from Cheryl who won gold in the girls indiv epee. :D
20th: meeting in school. I haven't gone about doing my tasks that have been assigned to my comm. I got a feeling that I don't really click with the comm yet for they know each other already from the main comm of CAC whereas I'm an "�utisder". I have no idea why the weird characters are appearing, nor why it is so difficult to type the "". This is not my laptop but another computer in the house.
Oh..dinner now. Bye! Pippi wants to eat with me.
