We stayed at the Rasa Sentosa Resort. At first, I thought that Mr E was joking when he said there were peacocks were running free around the island, but this suspicion soon ended when I saw a peacock perched on one of the stands at the ballroom on the 5th floor.

The rooms were great, the best bit about it was that there were nice balconies for each room.

No kidding. So close you could actually climb over. We could see people from other schools at their balconies as well. Apparently Kellett School (Hong Kong) and BIS (Vietnam) were on the same floor, every morning we could see them at their balconies.

But the best bit was the fact that you could see ships at twilight, if you woke up at 6 am you could see the sun slowly rising and the lights of distant ships glimmering in the distance. pretty romantic. This was Camille's favourite thing to do every morning. :)

Just when you thought JIS was pretty big and modern. This is Tanglin's Berrick Hall, it is on the 5th floor of one of their tall buildings, connected by a skywalk-kind-of-thing. It has the showiest lights for selective lighting, and it's the size of our gym. Their gym is twice the size of our gym and it literally echoes as you walk through it. Lots of empty space in the place. It's big, probably bigger than jis, but it's big is in height, everything is built upwards instead of sprawled over a large surface area. (hope that makes sense.) They actually have elevators, which is a better alternative to their puny, dark stairwells. (juxtapose that to our huge airy stairwells in jis)

There are a lot of things in Tanglin, they have fake grass courts to play football on, and they have the most signs in a school I have ever seen. Just look up and you'll see about 12 signs leading you to many various places. Swimming pool, junior school block, canteen, admissions... scary, you'd get lost there pretty easily. In fact, on the first few days at Tanglin I basically followed anyone I recognized from the woodwind section to the practice room.

There were 19 flutes, imagine that. In an actual orchestra, there are only supposed to be 2 flutes. There were about 13 flute 1's and 6 flute 2's. We had a massive string section as well, and a pretty big choir. I'm not hearing things when I tell you that I can hear Min Jin over that crowd, literally everyone just hits the note and stops singing, only she hits the note and holds it for the count it's worth. On the concert night, she should clearly have been the soloist, no kidding.

Here is Min Jin stacking our staple drink, the drink of the trip. Minute Maid's Apple Cranberry Juice. Our lunches were pretty much the same all the time, just sandwiches with different fillings. The vegetarians, despite being unable to eat roasted chicken or pizza, got to have more posh meals. Camille and I were so tired of sandwiches, on the last day we had sushi at the airport, just to have some rice. There was still some variety though, one dinner we had fish and chips, then Indian food.

Robert insisted he could deal with the Indian food, but he finished two bottles of water during the entire ordeal, and felt bloated afterwards. Ummi was trying to tell him it was no use drinking water when eating curry.

Most days started early, breakfast at 7am, going to Tanglin at 8am, 8.15am starting section practice. We basically played music most of the day, till about 4pm, stopping for breaks in between when we got fed a lot. But I guess the food they have still beats JIS canteen food.

Labels: school, travel, trips