It's 1323.

Day 3- 9th July 2008

Since I forgot a lot of things, I will just copy most of the content from my journal.

Zomg jet lagging like crazy now (2225, Vienna time).
We figured that a summary of yesterday was really eat, sleep, eat, sleep, eat sleep. So horrible.
I just transferred my 139 pictures (accumulated over 2 days) into my superduper 4.0GB thumbdrive with Jia Yu's magic laptop :D

Woke up at 8.30am today. We had nice nice breakfast at the hotel lobby.




Then we went outside the hotel to practice at 1000. Passers-by were taking stopping to listen and taking photos in their cars. Hahahaha. So funny. Then after a while, the receptionist told us that we were disturbing the people who were sleeping upstairs, so we had to go down to the basement. The acoustics there not bad.

1230, we left for the parade place. Took bus.

Our stop.


"Welcome to Graz to the World Choir Games 2008"!

It was outside the Mayor's something. Town Council or something like that? I'm not sure. But it's pretty.


They had all the names of the participating countries and their flags.




Some spelling errors...


There was a band playing! The guy in front with the green thing is the conductor. He's cool :D


They've these really tiny scores which they can hold/fasten onto their arm (depending on the instruments they're playing). Haha!


We went for lunch. 2 choices: Chinese restaurant or pizza.

Streets of Graz. That's Vicky in the middle.

My group went for pizza along with some others, at Pizza Cafe. Ms Lim went for Chinese food and she was all "!!!" when we wanted to eat pizza. "You eat yourself, I eat myself!"
HAHAHA!
I was sharing a table with Lo Yee, Christine, Jia Yu, Addie and Xenia. Christine and Addie were swooning over this waiter. -.-

'Tis the first time we got to eat food from the restaurants in Graz.


Nice restaurant, eh!

With strange pictures...


nice deco,




and a whole menu, just for chocolate.



We all took apple juice.

"What drink(s) would you like?"

The main course...Pizza! Topped with ham and mushrooms. €6-7+. Actually we ordered in set meals: One pizza and one soup. One pizza could feed about 2 people so we took 3 sets, since our table had 6.


It's really, really salty. We all got a shock when we took our first bite o.o But but but, after eating this, we all don't wanna eat Pizza Hut already. It's really good. The cheese is nice and the crust is thin and crispy :D

The soup!

清汤？O.o

There's a huge meatball-thingum inside. I think you can faintly see it from the picture. It's salty too. Superduperultra salty. But it tastes good!

After that, we got bored and tried taking artistic photos of our empty glasses.


Not bad lah, hor?

And other random things, like the cute papers they give to little kids to entertain themselves while waiting for food.

My camera does wonders. The paper was supposed to be bright yellow and look what supermacro did to it? It decolourised it! O:





Oh well.

Christine is happy with the Singapore Flag.




Well um, Jia Yu blinked. -.-

After lunch, we met back at the parade ground and practised in a corner a little way down from the area. There was this naked guy sitting on his window sill and crossing his legs and it was shocking. Someone took a picture and he posed O:
Hahaha land of music, we were just practising and facing the wall but people stopped to listen and they clapped after every song. I don't think you get that in Singapore. People will just stare at you like you're nuts.
The time for parade soon came. We were about to go back when this old lady approached us and spoke to us in German.

Old lady: -German German-
Us: Huh?
Old lady: -continued speaking in German-
Us: Karen!! (she was the only one who could speak German in choir)

So Karen came.

Old lady: -repeated whatever she said to us just now-
Karen: Huh?

Omg so comic lah HAHAHAHAHA.

Well Karen managed to understand what she was saying and they talked a bit. Something about whether we were coming here to sing and stuff. They've really nice people around!


Cute toilet sign.

We saw many choirs.

I forgot where this one was from, but their costumes are really pretty!


I think this one's from Hong Kong. Diocesan Boys' School Choir.


Okazaki High School Choir from Japan!


South African choir. Thhe girl in blue on the right's really pretty :D


Another South African choir. 3 altogether.


Group photo! I don't know where the guys are from, or the people in the middle.

Sooooo, parade. The countries were going in order of the alphabet so imagine Singapore. Ssssss. Lol. Yeah we had to wait quite a bit. The Romanians in front of us were quite on and high. They were cheering "Ro-man-ia!" and some stupid person (I forgot who, as usual) was going "Huh? Go Maria?"

Yun1 dao3!!

Parade was basically walking around Graz, from somewhere to Stadhalle Graz, where they had the opening ceremony.



Quite a long way, but nobody minded because the air was so nice! We were waving our small small flags and smiling to everybody and feeling proud to be Singaporean :D


On the way, Jane's flag got snatched by this group of guys who was collecting flags HAHAHAHA. So funny, they went "Give me that!" and just zook it was gone and in their hands.

See their collection? xD

Opening ceremony was made up of great performances by the orchestra and 3 choirs and a speech by the President of the World Choir Games.




Austrian Flag on the left, World Choir Games's on the right.

Flags!


More flags! Bet you can't spot the Singapore Flag, heh.



It's here! :D


Many similar-looking flags...

Red, white, green seems a popular combination O.o Sorry 'bout the blurness, my hands were too unstable.



Hahaha.

The performances were really good!

After that we went for dinner. I've totally no impression of where we went to, but says in my journal that we "went for dinner in a horrible place with horrendously big portions of food served".

Then we went back to the hotel for 30 minutes of practice, debrief, and went up to eat pi pa gao, jet lagging like crazy and feeling sick. Lag until like 1900+ only then "all look like zombies", as Ms Lim puts it. It's so horrible my eyes couldn't open and I was dizzying around.

Oh, the teachers and some others were really nice. They helped us to iron our gown for tomorrow's BIG DAY, and stayed up to do that. Thanks loads to all of them! :D

"Then now, sleep. Cannot tahan already."

Time now: 1511

Labels: WCG Graz 2008