Diaspora


collage50MCA
Swiped from williamnyk.
PS: I'm back! With a stale post. Enjoy. :P

Sunday is usually not a day of rest for me. But one could say that about Saturday too. Not to say that I work on Sunday, but it's just that I get no rest. This time, it's MCA's Persembahan Kebudayaan 50 Tahun Malaysiaku Gemilang at the National Stadium, Bukit Jalil. But before I get to that, let me describe what happened earlier in the day. After morning mass, mum and I ventured to Aman Suria to kill 2 hours before the Parish Assembly. The Ipoh Kopitiam has quite curry noodles and the place is airy. For the uninitiated, the Parish Assembly is like a company AGM. In context of the church, it is where the current year's accomplishments are reviewed to see whether past year objectives were fulfilled. Throw in some reports, some elections, a tea break, and you got yourself a 5-hour meeting. Mum and I however, sneaked off after a couple of hours. The priest was earlier commenting not to leave AFTER the tea break, well, I guess it's since we left BEFORE it. :P.

Rushing back to Puncak Jalil, we stopped by at my resident association president's Hari Raya open house. Hardly appetite-arousing fare. Mediocre beef rendang and ayam masak merah. The only good things were the freshly fried noodles and kuay teow. After shovelling down the food and thanking the president and his wife, we headed home to rest for about half an hour before venturing out again for the concert at 6:30pm with SK, HP and KT. Free biscuits and tea eggs at the entrance. And the emcees stressed that point at least twice. We sat quite far from the stage, at the bleachers. The performers looked like bugs. The VIP seats were much better, if only it hadn't rained cats and dogs that night. Those poor people were distributed raincoats and umbrellas.

A splendid opening performance by Karen Kong (preceeded by an Asmaradana dance). If you didn't open your eyes, you would have thought her to be a Malay artiste. Petah. Not to say that her pronounciation was very technical, but her singing was very natural. Powerful voice too. Later on, we were entertained by Andrew Tay, Danny One and several Malaysian sopranos. For some reason, Danny's voice wasn't quite there. Took the lousy mic perhaps. Haha. In addition to the singing, there were 50 lion dance troupes and a dance ensemble. It was a mixture of song, drums (the Hands Percussion Team was very impressive, synchronized and powerful. Sexy arms too! :P), dance (the lead male dancer lost the lower half of his costume in the first minute of his performance), dragon dance, orchestra (Chinese playing sitar, Malay playing er-hu, Chinese playing dzi) and wushu.

The whole performance was supposed to showcase 50 years of struggle in Malaysian Chinese community. Not a bad attempt. Definitely a colourful affair. Halfway through, Datuk Seri Ong Ka Ting delivered his speech with his raincoat on, trying to appear to be with the rakyat. "It is raining, but we are here together!". Unfortunately for him, he was upstaged by Michael Wong who later actually sang in the rain! The crowd went wild. A majority of attendees sang his hit song Fairy Tale sans music. It's ironic that most were tight-lipped during the national anthem. Heh. Erra Fazira made a brief appearance and in my opinion, it was a waste of makeup time.

At the end of it all, there was a small fireworks display and 50,000 odd spectators went home after jamming out of the carpark for half an hour. That concludes my day of "rest".

PS: Other accounts of this event can be found at bibinyonya and beautifulmale.

Comments

Ryan said…
Why are your Sundays so unfabulously busy?! I'm content with lazing at home with Willsn by my side, and you go around celebrating UNITY!??! Really..!
ikanbilis said…
quite a large number of audience i see. its lovely to see some kind of small celebration going on!
Ryan said…
Oops! There's another Ryan on top.

Anyway, yeah!! It was raining like hell! And guess how we performers did it! Don't you think the male host or emcee cute?!
savante said…
What was that bit about losing the lower half of the costume again?
William said…
@Ryan:
You also celebrate unity ma. A different kind...

@IkanB:
Big celebration!

@Ryan:
On Top? Haha. So far away... cannot see. I hated his English.

@Savante:
Skank. He was wearing leotards. Blek.

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