In Continuum.

Intoxication

First of all,Aranda has the nicest chalet in Singapore.I am quite sure of that.Facilities aside,i think it is the most luxurious one i have ever been to.Let's see,i've been to the NTUC ones next door,the one in Changi and the pathetic ones at East Coast Park.Though Changi has gigantic two-storey chalets,it never had the comfortable beds,nor was it ever able to shed the strange and eerie mood surrounding the compounds around the place.Aranda however,was empty when i went there,and was pleasently surprised by the 'nice-ness' of the place.

So yesterday was the Platoon BBQ/Chalet thing at Aranda.'Those who come after 6.30pm will be treated to a share of Island Tea,specially mixed and served!',said Eddie.Of course,with more grammatical mistakes.Anyway,so Kenneth,Jonathan and myself arrived the place after meeting the commanders.We were a little disorientated at the carpark,but after spotting Eddie's pathetic KIA,sitting in the middle of it all like a sore thumb,we knew we were at the right place.

The BBQ was already going on,and i was rather surprised that we were early.We dived in for the food straight away.I never was a great fire starter,but it was obviously wrong when Little Eddie tried to arrange the charcoals,and instead recieved a bunch of accusations from Jonathan and I.As usual.Jonathan did a brilliant job at starting the fire,and soon enough we found crab sticks,hot dogs,satay sticks on our grills,sizzling away with the sauce,as it slowly dripped into the white fire.

The rest of the gang started coming in,and soon enough we found ourselves spared from the onslaught of the mosquitos there.The liquors started coming down,and the drinking started.The Ultimate Intoxication.

Much of the night before this point were chatterings and talking.The old specs came down to visit,and we had a blast talking about the old days and the future.Myself,after a horrendous card game on top,came back down for some heavy drinking.Of course,i cant say i was the top-drinker of the night,but i drank quite a bit,at least in my books.Even Martin and See Hwee joined in the spree,and See Hwee has a great resistance to alcohol,i realised.

We were asked to drink a cup of...actually i dont even know what that was.There were Green Tea,Pepsi and Red Bull around,with Vodkas,Chivas and Gin mixed inside that drink.It was God awful,not because of the alcohol but because it simply tasted disgusting.And the drunkard Eddie,who was the part-time bartender at that moment of intoxication,didnt realise that what he was mixing for us,wouldnt even have been accepted by a starving dog.But we downed those anyway,and mixed somemore ourselves.After witnessing my 3-Second drinking,Eddie was so confident that i could beat See Hwee at speed drinking that he set us up for a competition.See Hwee,being the slower drinker,was bound to lose.Of course,that was before Eddie decided to give him a ten second head start.His idea of a ten second head start was not to countdown to one,but to say "Ten Seconds".He didnt exactly arrange that aspect properly with me,and in the end i lost the match by a mere half a second.But oh well,i guess it was all for the fun of it,and as punishment i drank another cup.

By Eleven,that was when the dinner started revealing themselves once more.Not on the grill,but in toilet bowls and on the tiled floors.The bunch of us were playing cards in one room when in the other,Martin and Kumaran collapsed.Suddenly,Martin dashed into our room and told us that Kumaran threw up all over the place,and soon enough he found his own head above the shallow pool of water in the toilet bowl,throwing up his dinner like the bloody Merlion.He did so five times,and i think he was the top-Puker of the night,despite everything.

I went downstairs to report the vomit incident,and downstairs situations were much worse.People werent even walking straight,and with their blood shot eyes and face,they were holding on to walls and pillars,trying desperately to stand straight.Wee Jin was in one corner puking his guts out,while Jonathan was trying to puke,because the feeling of oncoming vomit was apparently excruciating.People were puking everywhere,and if you hadnt seen the bottles of alcohols on the table,you wouldve thought that there was some kind of terrorist attack which involved some poisonous gas,with people puking their guts out everywhere.

The truly intoxicated ones,stayed over at the chalet,while myself and a couple of others hitched a ride home in WeiJie's van.Kenneth,QinYou,See Hwee,Shi Wei,Ah Chang and myself squeezed into the car of his,and we found ourselves cruising down the streets at a little over midnight,trying to overcome the dizziness in the head and reading the directory at the same time.At one point,Shi Wei(The navigator)was so confident about his memory,that he insisted that we should go straight at Bowen to my place,and ended up at his place instead.I'm still not sure why WeiJie was so convinced by ShiWei,since the navigator was the most drunk on the car at moment.But anyway,we dropped the rest of the guys off,and i was the second last guy to reach home,at a little after 1am.

It was a great night,though not so for the guys who managed to throw up their dinner.I had a little over ten cups i think,and i think Martin had like,six cups.But he had a 'Nick',which meant that he drank a shot without anything added,pure alcohol.I got to give him that,and that mustve been why he threw up the most number of times.His mother's going to be very disappointed with him,i imagine.