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The announcement of team members was made shortly before the phone handover ceremony at the Hibiscus function room in One World Hotel. I was indeed very lucky to be paired with Pinkpau, cuz I knew she could write very well! She could come up with just the right descriptions for our photos during the race.

You can say that I had it easy - I practically skipped the whole description-writing part and left that to her. She also went around interviewing people (-.-”) in order to get more background info and stuff. We’ll come to that later…

The Hibiscus function room was abuzz with people opening up the N82 boxes and playing with the phone (which the organizers had cleverly charged so we could switch on the phone and use it right away!). That room was also where we tapau-ed the hotel’s pencil box (containing a full set of stationery)… LOL!

After the phone handover, we were told to go back to our room to rest, as we needed the energy for race day. And being put in the same room as Ah pOp really redefines photography…

I do that too, all the time. I guess that’s the natural trait in all bloggers - we take everything and anything we see. And so the two of us spent around 30 minutes taking photos in the room - without touching/moving anything in there. Imagine scouring a crime scene in CSI… touch nothing, only take photos.

If we had a non-blogger in the room at that time, we’d have been labeled siaokias. Anyway, I loved our room. It was so damn nice! Check out the fruits they prepared on the table… I thought they were interesting. And oh, pOp got a greeting on the flat-screen… *jealous*

So damn cool right? And needless to say…

Haha. That’s right… we didn’t bring our cameras for nothing. I was really determined to look for my name somewhere, too. I finally found it…

It was printed on a much thinner surface… haha. So I only got a letter, and pOp got the TV. I wasn’t even interested in the content of that letter… pOp helped me to read it aloud while I was shooting other random objects in the room. Like this:

pOp’s Alphagrapher watch was just screaming for attention, I couldn’t ignore it! We later shifted our attention to our new toys.

Believe me we took lots of photos of our phones. We also took out our N95’s and put them together as one big N-series family.

And oh, have I showed you guys the bathroom yet? Gee I loved it!

After a bout of siao photography, we were thinking of what to do next. We ended up at the 24-hours Drive-Thru’ McD’s in Centrepoint, together with Szetoo, Julian and Pinkpau!

The next day we had the whole morning to ourselves…. and we just didn’t feel like getting off bed. Lazed for a while, before receiving a phone call from our friend Vic, who was also a friend of Kim’s partner Fairuz, saying that we could actually have our breakfast downstairs.

That’s the view from our hotel room. We later went for breakfast, and then walked over to 1U for some shopping before checking out of the hotel.

How many of you actually knew there was a One World Hotel smacked right in between Sri Pentas and 1U? I had never noticed it. Anyway, the hotel was very nice, I must say! Surpassed my expectations multiple-fold!

That’s the view of the lobby area.

Here’s pOp walking up a flight of stairs in front of me, while we were headed towards 1U. The photo has been post-processed of course - giving it a little ‘dreamy’, unreal effect.

Met up with Szetoo, and bought socks for our new phones. The Golla socks we bought came with a whopping 10-year warranty!!

After checking out of the hotel, we proceeded to Bakerzin for our lunch. Nokia really made us feel like VIPs lah.

I forgot what it’s called. It tasted alright. There was so much of photo-taking going on that the waitresses actually had a tough time serving us with more food.

More mouth-watering food…

That’s our dessert. It was good! I forgot what it was called on the menu, but everything was pre-ordered by Nokia except for our main course, which we could actually choose between chicken and fish (was it fish? Hmm…)

We had plenty of time for more photo sessions in Bakerzin itself. Had a good chat with everyone over the dining table as well. Psst: Note the N82’s on the table…

pOp using the new N82 to take photos of some of the female participants. The N82 features a xenon flash, and a 5.0-megapixel camera. Camera response is fast, and photo quality is superb!

Finally, lunch was officially over and it was time for media interviews, before the race flag-off. There were lots and lots of viewcams going around.

I realized that more than 50% of my photos had pOp in them… LOL. We were posing in front of the stage when this little boy appeared out of nowhere and started catwalking on stage, haha. Shortly before the race flag-off, it started to rain! Although we were given raincoats in our backpack, I really wished we didn’t need to use it!

Edit @ April 20th, 2008: Part 3 is now up!

P/s: Thank God for weekends… the past week had been torturous!

Related Entries:

• The Nokia Wireless Adventure II Race (Part 1)
• Nokia N82 Wireless Adventure II - Soul of the Night