Firstly, sorry for the lack of posts over the past few weeks! The Raya holidays and subsequent work weeks took a lot of my time and put the posts which I had in mind into a growing backlog. Hope to get to these soon, but you never know what might pop up at the last minute.
Anyways, let me start with the department teambuilding activity, this time is on board the Star Cruise Pisces! And best of all, it's free and easy, i.e. no activities planned :D I always find such activities (split into a group and play some games) to be rather tiresome and are poor attempts to actually team-build. Ok, lets get to the story~~
Boarding time at 6PM. Quite a rush as we left office at 4.30PM and I wanted to take a shower at home before boarding.
Lifeboats
Upon check-in, they will give you an access card to your room and for any billing. But you had to surrender your IC for safekeeping. And look at my room. Gosh. So small. The top can even be pulled down to be a double-decker room. And the washroom is also super-small, like on a plane :-S
Already starving, we placed our bags and headed to the buffer dinner. Dinner and the next morning's breakfast are provided as part of the package (I think costs RM150).
Food. Not much to choose, and it's more like economy rice. But we gobbled it down anyways!
After eating, we head to the live band show. Kinda boring until the next activity: Lingerie models from China! I saw alot of people spraying blood that night.. and I'm no exception! :P
After that, it was pretty much on your own. So we roamed around the ship from deck to deck to check out what was interesting... And there wasn't much honestly. The main attraction is the casinos but since I don't really gamble, I wandered around hoping to use this opportunity to exercise my D3000! Luckily I found a few "volunteers" to be my model :D
Nice dome
Walked outside...
SF and LP
Timer shot
I wasn't the only one who brought an DSLR along. Check out these other colleagues, armed with all manner of lenses and flashes!
One of my favourite shots: Caught Zoe's reflection on the wall :D
At the top deck..
Zoe very excited it seems!
Another of my fav shot...
Shooting at night with little light has always been my biggest fear. And using a DSLR is no different. The last thing you wanna do is to turn on the flash and obliterate all the subtle lighting, so I switched to Manual mode. After a few trials, it looks like this one can do the trick! However, the picture still turned out fuzzy and dark when downloaded on the computer, so I used GIMP to sharpen and tune the colors. Some might scorn at using software to fix the picture, but if it can save or enhance the picture, why not?
Radar turning
The rest of the night was spent Karaoke-ing, chatting and hanging out in the casino. By 2AM, I was dead tired and decided to retire. Some of the other stayed up all night whether at the bar, spa-ing, massaging, etc. My bed was uncomfortable and small and it was very cold. And my room mate was nowhere in sight throughout the night :P After turning and flipping about on my bed, the alarm rang. It was 5.45AM;time to catch sunrise!
Quite a crowd had build up... and many of them also hoping to catch sunrise on camera!
But it was a cloudy day, so not so lucky! It's still a nice experience though, albeit freezing cold!
As the ship goes closer, we can see Penang island dy...
"To Frontier and beyond!"
After that we had breakfast and checked-out. By then the ship has docked and we left Swettenham Pier. Friday was unofficially an "off-day" to recover... I think all of us need it!
