Week 1

Greetings from NS! I'm fine. No injuries, no mental traumatic experiences. I'm still in one piece and in one week have become somewhat accustomed to life here. I use the term "somewhat" very strongly.

Let me first start this post by bitching about NS. The dorm I'm in fits 32 single beds. You can just imagine the immense sense of comfort a boy of my; let's say "measurements" feels sleeping on a thin, constant itch inducing single bed. I turn and I fall off. On to a dirty, dusty cement floor that will excite a vacuum cleaner to life. Each bed comes with a metal locker, very useful, now if it only close properly.

The bathrooms. Ohhhh, the bathrooms. The bathroom has both the communal bath, the one you use the scooper and fill it with mountain-dew coloured water from the communal pool and pour it all over yourself, and showers. I prefer showers. I SO prefer showers. The communal baths are okay when.....when....When I find out I'll tell you. The bathroom is always wet of course, and the toilet stalls are always dirty. You know, like any public toilet in Malaysia. Same old, same old.

The activities this week were zero, zilch. Well we DID have classes, morning exercises and creating our company's cheer and stuff. But nothing of the real NS stuff I looked forward to. We have morning assemblies every morning at 6.30; sorry, I mean 0630 hours. And we TRY to march but fail spectacularly. But I can't blame them, many of the trainees haven't marched in their lives, but the trainers should be teaching us. Most probably next week I hope. Because these past few days have just been a long wait. We seem to wait for everything here - Before we start our assembly we wait, before classes we wait,during classes we wait for it to end, wait, wait, wait. The management here is poor but what can one do?

The food here isn't bad. There are two places to eat here at camp. The Dewan Makan and the Kantin. At the D.Makan, you don't pay but at the Kantin you order and pay. At both places the food is okay but my bowel movements say otherwise. Won't go into too much detail about that.

The clothes they have provided us are all themed the classic PLKN blue. The sports clothes are okay. They're comfortable to wear but the track pants doesn't exactly fall properly around the middle region, exposing, well you know. But they're comfortable. The class shirts are itchy though and very irrelevant. I don't see why you can't just wear sports clothes. Instead of giving us 2 pairs of class and sports clothes, give us 4 pairs of sports clothes their more practical, comfortable and probably cheaper. I have no other complaints about the clothes but I WILL have a go at the towel they give.

According to many dictionaries and encyclopedias and most often of all, common sense. A towel is supposed to absorb water, drying the user or the object the towel is used on. I don't know if it's some kind of endurance and/or patience test, but the NS towels never do what is generally expected of a towel. Thank goodness I followed the wise words of Ford Prefect.

Now on to the most important thing that either makes or breaks NS. The people. Since I AM bitching, I will start with the negative.

The negatives for the people here are few and very difficult to explain. Please bear with me.

The worlds we are from seem extremely distant. Many of the things I find appalling, seem like common demeanour among others. A few of which is the actions some of the male trainees take when near the girls. They whistle, howl, and what I find worst of all is they actually throw stones and even mock and condescend the girls. How do these actions attract the opposite sex is beyond me. But like I said, this I think is common for the boys and I think the girls as well. There are many other things they do. They slack ALL the time, the leader as well. I haven't been happy with my company's leader but I don't want the post of course. He should be better than this. At least try and learn. He does nothing of the sort.

Some of the other trainees also mock me and my other English speaking friends when we speak in the international language. I don't think they understand thats why but it really is annoying. I remember once, when a guy from my dorm just screamed a loud YES! when we were talking. I laughed my head off there and then. He actually interrupted mid-sentence, and answered a question I asked. The conversation went like this

Me: Are they idiotic or what?
Annoying guy: YES!

At that point I lost it.

The language barrier is a big issue for myself. It's not easy finding English speaking folk here. So I've had loads of BM, cantonese and mandarin practice here. But because of this barrier I find it more difficult to fit in but it's definitely nothing to worry about. I'll just give myself more time and practice.

This post is long enough, I'll have something better to say next time. Hopefully. Thanks for reading.

To all my friends and family I'm fine. No worries.

And a very special shoutout to my other one and a half : Hormat! Hormat ke depan....HORMAT!