Seafood Dinner Treat at JB

Last Friday was Friday the 13th, but realizing this doesn’t matter to me coz I don’t believe in it anyway. Yet what was supposed special about this day? Well, my Dept Head has invited our Project Team and a few colleagues from the Training Dept for a seafood dinner treat at Johor Bahru!

Honestly, I am not exactly a fan of seafood (especially since it is regarded as a harmful food category), but what sparked me up was that this was my first dept outing together with my colleagues!

The dinner treat wasn’t important to me; but rather, I hoped to experience for myself, how it is like to go out for an outing together with my project team mates. Work, as usual, can be a stressful rush for us, and I was curious to observe how this tensed group of colleagues would relate when it’s not about work.

The evening began with a group of 10 of us traveling to JB in two cars. We chatted just as usually do, except that this time, there was a traffic jam which made our stomachs growl in hunger. It was soon reinforced that Friday night is one of the worse nights to cross over to JB because many people will be driving to Malaysia and huge crowds of foreign workers would be rushing back to Malaysia on their motorbikes, squeezing in and around fellow motorcyclists, just to get as far as possible towards the checkpoint. It was a stressful sight just watching them horn at each other, while other squeeze in between the queues of motorcyclists! Indeed, watching this scene just makes me reflect and be really thankful that going home in Singapore is still very much more accessible compared to other countries.

On a few instances, both cars lost track of each other in the midst of so many vehicles traveling on the road, leaving those at the backseat to turn around every few minutes to check if the other car is still following behind. The worse still is that bigger vehicles such as private buses just force their way through coz they know that expensive cars won’t want to squeeze in with them and run the risk of getting scratched in the process.

The car which the Training Manager was driving was ahead of us and it stopped next to a yellow bus, waiting for us to catch-up and look out for this big yellow bus stopped at the left side of the road at Johor Bahru. As our car got nearer (about 450 meters away), John suddenly called me saying that the yellow bus suddenly drove away! It made all of us roared in laughter! This lesson is to tell us not to use a vehicle as a road marker! *Laugh*…

Finally, we reached this place called Taman Sentosa (or something like that) and walked towards this hawker centre. My Dept Head laughed at me for carrying my black bag containing all 5 passports and 1 mobile phone from those in the same car as me. I thought this was weird too, but what to do… everyone passed their passports to me, since I had the biggest bag to keep them. Hmm…

Seeing such a big group, one of the hawkers immediately took out this huge aluminum cover to use as a large table top! Now we had more space, but this aluminum cover was bent and uneven, causing the plates to incline towards the centre of the table! It was comical…

My Dept Head ordered about 7 dishes of food to share (fried sotong, fried oyster, crayfish, deer meat, butter prawns, hotplate egg tou-foo, etc) and we had a good time of chatting and laughing. But this was where I noticed a difference in nature of conversation.

At work, it was often objective. At a casual setting like this dinner, it was teasing and laughing over nonsense. These two aspects are fine with me, but somehow I felt that something was missing – thoughtful sharing and conversation. Perhaps this is not often possible in a big group setting, but I felt that we didn’t really learn much about each other through the process, except building rapport with each other. Maybe that’s the point – to establish rapport and not friendships; after all this is a gathering of colleagues, and both Dept Heads were present as well.

After everyone had visited the toilet, we stood outside while waiting for everyone else to gather back. It was then that I started to notice that there were several cats lying around outside and one kitten was so cute! I felt like bringing it home!

We split into the 2 cars again, however this time it was decided based on who stays at the East and others who stayed at the North. It was an enjoyable time, though most of us were very tired at the end of the day. However, my mood took a turn when we saw this old man with trembling body going from car to car (at the Johor Bahru checkpoint) begging for money. John told us that these people are very poor thing. Sometimes they can stand there and beg for the whole day and not even get enough to buy food for that day. So John gave him some money.

This made me reflect how these people live from day to day. Often, these people do not come to mind, when we go about the hustle and bustle in the busy life in Singapore, be it studying or working. I really wonder how these people live each day. My heart just broke to see them in such a state. And John told me that such sights can just break our hearts and spoil our mood, if we are going overseas for a holiday. And the worst part - people living in developed countries actually start to feel uncomfortable or sad for them, because we are not used to seeing such plights in our own country.