Sandcastle here I come...

Mood


I am soooooo dead tired....


When is the last time you built a sandcastle using your mother's pail? Like 20 some years ago? I still remember it was at Lumut, Perak. Now Lumut is a Navy base already. Anyway, we had this Sandcastle team building event at the beach. I thought it would be sooo fun to build sandcastles. But I gotta tell you, now that you are an adult, no more using washing pails or ice cream box or Tupperware to do sandcastle especially when it's sponsored by your company. You were given proper equipments.

They even sell it for SGD35.00. Shovel not included.

Call me Village girl lar.. but I seriously had no idea sandcastles need equipment. I thought all you need is just sand and water right? Wrong! If you really wanna build a serious sandcastle, you need equipment and I gotta said, it made me felt like a construction worker not to mention we really had an ex-construction worker in our team. He is so kind to volunteer his expert opinion which falls on deaf ears most of the time. He even mixed sand like mixing cement.

The entire event took 4 hours but the actual sandcastle building is only slightly above 2 hours. So the other 2 hours was spent:-

• Loitering around the beach taking photos
• Listening to instruction
• Learning how to use the equipment
• Learning how to build sandcastle

No joke ar, you need to know how to use the equipment and you need to know how much water to how much sand or your sandcastle will remain a pile of sand. We had to pass the sandcastle karipap test before we are even allowed near the equipment. Ladies got extra lesson on how to use the shovel.

Our mission is to build a castle with a 5 feet tower (yes, as tall as me), complete with surrounding wall, a 3 layer defense, armory, barracks and a escape chute for royalty. After I heard that, I almost fainted. I am a business analyst for God's Sake, not a bloody architect. Some more have to draw floor plan and the head trainer have to approach floor plan before we can start. Some serious team building huh.

I got drafted to do the wall (1 feet tall), of all things. So had to spent my time squatting kung fu style packing sand. Back breaking work I can tell you and when our walls were about to meet the on coming side built by other team members we found it was misaligned. Now your know why I am not an architect right ha ha ha... anyway we solve it by building an archway over it. Yeah yeah the archway is senget but we prefer to say it's fengshui ala Lilian Too style. Desparation Creativity at work.

Anyway towards the 2nd hour, the trainer said change concept, now it's suppose to be a theme park and you have to swap the one you are building with another one. Oh goodie someone's geting the senget wall. But I am too happy too fast, the castle that we adopt has a wall that is 1 feet thick but when you try to build something over it, bloody wall collapsed. Ai~~~ this is call got look no substance. So gotta spend time reinforcing that wall. Now it don't look so good trading places after all ha ha ha.

After 2 hours of back breaking work.. Our masterpiece is as below. Did I mention the tower the previous team constructed decided to become a leaning tower and collapsed on us, so we had to rebuild it. It's adversity over and over. In the end our team park don't look too shabby. By the way we cheated on the tower, it was only 4.5 feet. Well, no time mar, remember we had to rebuild the fallen one.

Sweat and blood...

Now compare this to a professional sandcastle. This sandcastle sit smack in front of our sandcastle built by the trainer.

Oh I wish I can shrink myself and explore it.

They even put some tiny figurine to make it real. I guess this is how they filmed Lord of the Rings huh.

Defend!!!

Yeah, I was grumbling and all but it was serious fun even with annoying people trying to give advise and tell you what to do. I think I am going to buy that kit and bring my family to the beach to play!