Over there its a polite thing to honk the car because it is apparently important that it notifies others of your presence.
Anyway, today is the official opening of the Festival of Biotech. We went around exploring the school right after breakfast (which was nan, rice, other Indian food, and lots of curry.) And they put lots and lots of inspirational quotes on the walls everywhere.
The ACS team :) From left: Anmol, Tong Nhat Duong, Guo Yang, Mervyn, Nicholas, Mr Goh, Alo (a student from City Montessori School), Me, Daniel.
We were one of two teams representing Singapore. The other was Global Indian International School. Which, well, doesn't consist of Singaporeans. 14 Countries attended, with the likes of Russia, Japan, Jordan, Germany, Sri Lanka, Nepal etc.
The See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Say No Evil monkeys XD Btw, Mervyn is in year 5, so you can infer which Chinese zodiac he's born in, which somehow makes the picture come together nicely.
Me and Mervyn.....
More of the school (which by the way contains a convention centre, a park, owns two radio channels, and holds the Guinness world record for the largest school by student population at 22,612 in the year 1999)...
The event started with a series of (might I say terribly boring?) videos about the school. Its not that the school has not history. It has a rich and fascinating history and has come very far. But the producers didn't really know the meaning of being concise.
We sat in the first few rows, which consisted of sofas (muahahahaha).....
Thank goodness we could escape for a while because we had to settle the competitions that Guo Yang was taking part in, because two of them clashed.
When we came back to the convention centre, the videos were almost over :D. Next was the interactive session with the, as they put it, "galaxy of eminent scientists". Oh do they misuse the English language. But in fairness to them, they had a huge number of scientists among the likes of chiefs of eye institutes, crop/biotech associations, and numerous other research institutes, and I guess that's what they were trying to describe.
And boy was the interactive session funny. In their culture, its okay to interrupt each other, and it was hilarious watching some of the students arguing with the scientists. And it was so funny to see both the student and scientist try to speak at the same time, and interrupting each other.
After that we had to attend the press conference along with another photo taking session with more of the bright orange flower garland thingy. And it was hilarious, because they couldn't find the Singapore teams, even though we were there. We were like "here cannot find, on map also cannot find little red dot" XD
Then lunch, then slack until 5 p.m. when we had to go attend the official opening ceremony and introduction of the teams.
There was a moot world parliament. Yes, the Indians want to abolish the United Nations and establish their own "world parliament", and they were going on and on about Article 51 of the Indian constitution and how it was the only way to world peace. LOL
The the gust of honor arrived, who was A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, one of India's former presidents. After he arrived, no one bothered listing to the speaker on stage because they were all busy snapping picture of A.P.J.
This was taken when A.P.J. went on stage to speak. He's at the podium, and standing to his right in white is Mr Jagdish Ghandi, founder-manager of City Montessori School.
Then A.P.J. opened the Festival of Biotech. And they had this enormous rotating DNA model...
Then was the cultural performances (they have great misconceptions about the national costumes of numerous countries.....), mostly dancing etc. And lastly the introduction of the teams, going on stage with our school flags (which felt awesome), and oh my goodness even more photographs XD
Dinner was at their swimming pool.
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