My team had a team building event last week, together with our china and japan colleagues and our US boss, there were like 15 of us.
It was a one day event last thursday, the programmes include a morning trek at Macritchie Reservoir followed by brunch at a prata place and then a cooking event in the afternoon at SunRice Academy. Nothing exciting right? In fact, the few of us have proposed for a trip to Mt Kinabalu to climb mountain but due to budget constraint, the idea was being dropped.
My boss even came up with some fancy names for the events, the morning walk is called "Awaken" , the prata brunch is called "Refresh" and the cooking session as "Indulge".
We gathered at the reservoir at about 8am, weather was abit gloomy when I stepped out of the house. The morning trek idea came from one of the angmo boss who has stayed in Singapore for like 6+ years and apparently nobody tell the other angmo including my boss what to expect cos my boss and some others came in jeans and pants. I was thinking to myself "Good luck man!" I used to trek here 2 years ago every Saturday morning and even with shorts, you will bound to perspire and the trek is like 10km, how to substain wearing pants or worse jeans!
Anyhow, about 2km into the trek, we were "awakened" by thunder! Yes downpour! None of the Singapore team brought umbrellas but our japan and china colleagues did, hehe so we had to share the umbrellas like 3 to 1 kind. We stayed rooted for like 20 minutes and the rain didnt appear it's going to lighten so we waited waited and when it didnt subside after 30 minutes, we have to do a kebelakang pusing (Malay for turning back).
We next headed to the prata place for an early breakfast at 9am, talk about waking up early for a good exercise, followed up with an unhealthy breakfast of fried and oily stuff :) Ordered teh halia, prata and mee hoon goreng. Ate and chatted till about 11am, the makan session took longer than the intended walk, haha.
Went home to take a nap before meeting the rest again at SunRice, the cooking Academy at Fort Canning Center. We drew lots and were grouped into teams named after spices, mine was Onion, others were called Lime, Pepper, Tumeric. Had a tour round the Spice Garden where you see lots of planted spices like laksa leaves, panda leaves, lemon grass, ginger, pepper, basil etc. This garden is apparently opened to public but didnt know it existed till that day, and it is just a short walk from the Registry of Marriage. Each team was given a map to identify where the different spices can be found and my team which consists of the big boss came in last, haha, we were more like enjoying the view rather than looking around for the answers.
The lesson were taught by a Thai chef but no we are not cooking TomYam soup, we had a East Meet West fusion kind of menu. On the recipe, we are supposed to cook a roast chicken and paper wrapped spring rolls (like those Vietnamese kind). The chicken dish is not that difficult to do, the main thing is the spices. We have to chop onions, garlic, basil, lemongrass and other assorted spices and then mix it with the whole chicken, massae it and put it in the oven. Sounds simple right? Ya not too difficult. The springroll item need some practise, we each took our turns to do one and each turns out in different sizes, some long some short :) We also need to decorate the springroll dish to compete with other teams to see who can come out with the best design and layout. Each team were given a tomato and a cucumber and together with the springrolls that we have made, we need to decorate it.
Quite yucky right? Haha we really scored low on creativity compared to what the other teams come up with.
We wrapped up the teambuilding event with dinner, we ate what we cooked, and so far, didnt hear anyone reported sick due to the cooking :)
