[Saturday, 30 September, 2006]
On the night before, I finally received Ouxiang’s letter which contained the Special package for holidays resort, given by SingTel.
“Costa Sands – 2 Days 1 Night resort stay at Costa Sands Resort with 2 complimentary Wild Wild Wet tickets at S$60”
After waking up, I started to message Wilson and Kailin to see if they could drive me over to Pasir Ris to book the resort; however, they were not free.
I made a call to the Pasir Ris resort and the very friendly middle-aged lady told me it was cheaper to just use my mum’s NTUC membership card, which would cost me $210 for three days two nights.
Whereas with the promotion package ($60), I had to foot extra $50 (weekends) for the first night and another $105 for the second night, which was $215 in total, except that I would get two Wild Wild Wet tickets which I most probably would not be using.
The price for Costa Sands Downtown East resort was $178, $32 cheaper than the Pasir Ris one, but there were some restrictions. I believed my friends would have to foot more than $32 in total for the $1 ticket (CRAP) each to enter the Downtown East resort. Whereas, I heard the Downtown East chalet was smaller and the barbecue pit was further away; the chalet might be on the second storey as well.
I owed the booking to my elder brother again with his VISA card.
Paying was straightforward but the confirmation from friends was a headache. If only all of them were spontaneous, I would not have so many problems.
Firstly, I would have to ask my current closest groups of friends first whether they could stay overnight, and I supposed were my volleyball friends and NS friends. Since more of my BMCC friends are currently working or having weird NS working days, I would begin with them together with my GESS team-mates and juniors since they were kind of interlinked.
Then, I had to get Vivi to invite some of her Tzu Chi friends to accompany her. Next would be all the other groups of friends like my ex classmates, team-mates and platoon-mates, and since the chalet was not big, I could only invite them over for the barbecue on the second night, which was also my birthday.
For those individuals, I would have to decide if I should invite them there because I would not have the time to entertain them individually. I hoped no friend would feel neglected.
Just as I recalled I had not been using my 1000 free SMSes at the last day of the month, I quickly mass messaged some of my volleyball friends before midnight. Since it was still early and almost a month to go, I could not expect everyone to answer me yet, but at least I made sure they got to know about the chalet so that they could update their schedule earlier.
After all these, food would be another big problem.