Arrived in Dubai at 3am on Friday. I slept throughout the flight. Didn’t even watch any movies. Luckily, so did A’isyah.
I rented a car since I didn’t want to be tied down to the “official” program. Most of the group hadn’t been to Dubai before, so they had arranged a full program for sight-seeing. Since I’ve already lived in Dubai for almost two years, I wanted to do my own thing.
I was supposed to bunk with some officemates at their apartment, which was a place I had stayed at before. But on the plane, I was informed that the company had re-assigned my living arrangements, so I was to go to the main hotel (Arabian Park Hotel). Of course, I had no idea where this hotel was.
Thankfully, the rental car was delivered to right where the chartered bus was waiting. So when I picked up the car, the rest of the group was boarding the bus. I followed behind the bus to the hotel, which is really out in the middle of nowhere.
Rested for a bit after checking in, and then went down for breakfast around 8am. There was only one other couple from our group down at the restaurant at the time, and they were well into their breakfast already. Now, we had been informed that breakfast was included, but all of a sudden, one of the waiters comes over to their table and asks for a credit card or something for the payment. Vincent’s wife sure was surprised! And since we were sitting one table away, so was I when I overheard this. Turns out that the booking was only for the rooms, and no breakfast included. We told the staff to check the booking again, since we had been informed it was included. They did, and came back with the same info.
I was already halfway through my breakfast, so there was no backing out. So at the end, I said to Vincent that we’ll cover it first and sort it out with Joanne, the admin staff who was supposed to be in charge. So when we were done with breakfast, I asked for the bills for both our tables and charged it to my credit card. It was AED 70.00 a head! Eeks! And not even the best of breakfasts!
Vincent (or his wife, dunno who) managed to get a hold of Joanna in her room after this, and then Joanne calls our room saying that she just found out that morning that when the Dubai office made the bookings, somehow breakfast did not get included. So she said that we were on our own for the first day, and that she would try to sort it out afterwards. Of course, I gave her a piece of my mind about misinformation, and said that I would claim back the charge. She told me to give it a try.
Found out later that the rest of the group encountered the same problem later that morning, but they found out before going in. This put some people off breakfast. (Of course! Who wants to pay AED 70 for breakfast?) But Teik Lee or Chor Wah or someone made some kind of arrangement and most of them ate with the hotel charging the breakfasts to the room. Too late for us though.
After breakfast, Nany, A’isyah, Vincent and his wife, and myself went off to drive around. I decided to go to the Atlantis on the Palm Jumeirah, since that had opened already. So we went there, took a look around and took some pics.
Then we headed to Mall of the Emirates. I left the rest of them there while I went to the mosque nearby (close to the Jumeirah resort), then met up for lunch. After lunch, we headed back to the hotel to rest.
When the rest of the group had come back from their outing for that day, Vincent, Khairina, and myself went to the Jumeirah Beach Resort to check out the venue for the dinner. We wanted to recce the stage and see what we had to work with for our performance.
Coming back to the hotel we got lost. As a matter of fact, it took me several tries before finding a decent route to the hotel. Hehe. I kept taking a long way around. One route had me crossing Garhoud bridge and then re-crossing the Creek at the Business Bay Crossing. Another had me crossing Business Bay, making a u-turn at Festival City, and crossing back.
Terrible, I know. Apparently, the best route is on Oud Metha Road, passing Al Wasl Hospital, and turning at the Emarat gas station, which takes you on a back-road to the hotel.
So, we ended up arriving back at the hotel just before 6pm, and the bus was supposed to leave at 6pm. Not a problem for me, but it would be for the other two. Got ready in half an hour, then went back down. Luckily for the other two, the bus was late and it was still there, or they would have had to squeeze into the car with me.
I must say, the venue was done up nicely, with banners outside. The bagful of door gifts was pretty nice too.
We went back to a buffet dinner, after last year’s (almost unanimously voted) disastrous sit-down ala carte dinner. The food, what little of it I sampled, was alright. Nothing really to shout about, but at least decent.
For entertainment, besides our “Idol” performances (five in total), we had a Malaysian Idol in the house. Jaclyn Victor performed in between our own performances, in what was meant to be the highlight of the evening I’ll bet. I didn’t get to see most of her show, since my group was getting ready for our performance.
And speaking of our performance, we were a little “off”. I mixed up the placement for one of the lines in our haka, and there were a few coordination issues. The worse was the face makeup. Our stage makeup went missing, so we had to get last minute replacements, consisting of liquid foundation and eyeliner pencils. It didn’t really have as big of an impact, and together with the lighting problems, it wasn’t as good as our taped video performance we handed in as part of the audition stage. In the end, we were one of two teams that won consolation prizes. I’m not surprised about the winning team though, after having watched their audition video.
Of course, the lucky draw was something most looked forward to, but this year they only had 30 draws, unlike previous years where everyone won something (if only the smallest gift). The other change was that there were no trips in the prize list this time around.
The official program ended shortly after 11pm, and we headed straight back to the hotel afterwards.
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