Sabine, 24 October 2007
Brunei ,

Almost two month now

This time I’m a bit later than usual to update you on what I’ve been doing here on the other side of the world. And there is of course a reason for that. During last week I haven’t had any “free” evening after work, since there was always something else to do. I told you last time that Hari Raya was celebrated here in Brunei and that it officially only lasts for three days, but unofficially the whole “thing” with open houses and celebrations just continues for more or less a whole month. It’s quite contradictory, first everybody fasts for a whole month and then they only eat for the next month! And that’s basically what Heidi and I did, every evening after work, for the last week. Everyday we were invited for an open house somewhere. On Saturday we even visited three of them. Then there was also a 7th anniversary of the Empire as well as end of Ramadan celebration at the hotel, so we were quite “busy”.

On Monday was then the “big” day, it was called “Team Member Appreciation Day”. Before hand you had to sign up for either Monday or Tuesday to join. So we decided to go on Monday, which meant that we had to do stupid teambuilding games for the whole morning. It wouldn’t be so bad, if it wouldn’t have been over 30 degrees outside while we had to run around playing games. The only good thing about that day was that I was off after lunch for the rest of the day, till it was time to go to the party at night. So after taking a nice nap while everybody else was working we got ready to go to the “big party”. We already heard so much about the hotels own nightclub (called “The Base”) that we were really looking forward to finally see it. And all the things people told us were true. It is a really nice nightclub with everything you need to have a great night. It really is a shame that they are not allowed to use that place and open it for the public, they could make so much money with it. You probably all know that alcohol is prohibited here, but that’s not the only problem. Besides that also any kind of nightlife/entertainment is prohibited as well, which makes it kind of hard to “operate” a nightclub in Brunei

Yesterday Heidi and I finally saw our first VIP guest coming to the hotel. It was the Palestinian president Muhmud Abbas. Well calling him a VIP probably goes too far, but at least it was someone famous/well known Everything was over quite quickly. The whole “entourage” (around 20 people) passed by in less than two minutes and all the guests in the lobby where wondering who that famous person was, who was given that much attention.

For the rest of the week I will probably be busy with working on my project and my school assignment. But at least I got some new ideas how to continue after I talked to Bernadette, the hotels marketing consultant from Australia. I really like her and she really knows what she is talking about. I think Heidi and I can learn a lot from her. By the end of the week I will finally go on my first weekend trip. I will fly to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia). I’m really looking forward to it. Even tough I actually only have 1 ½ days over there to explore the city, (since I will be leaving Brunei late on Friday night and have to go back to the airport early on Sunday afternoon) I will make the best out of it and see as much as possible. And of course do some shopping as well

I will tell you more about visit to Kuala Lumpur when I get back!

Till then,
Bye x Sabine