Sabine, 2 January 2008
Brunei

Happy New Year

First of all I want to wish all of you a Happy New Year, I hope you had fun starting 2008! Here in Brunei New Years Eve was a bit different than usual. First of all Heidi and I had to work, more or less voluntary. The situation was this: When we came to the office on the 31st of December we asked MG our head of department if we would be allowed to come back to the hotel at night and watch the fireworks. Her answer to that was, not for leisure purpose only if we would be on duty. So Heidi and I decided it makes no difference if we work or not, since there is nothing to do anyway here in Brunei. The both of us agreed to work that night, so MG send us back home for the rest of the morning and we had to be back for work at 3pm. With this surprisingly free morning we went straight to the gym to work out a bit and “maintain” our tan we still had left from Bali

At three we took the bus again to work and not our car, to which we are so used to by now and don't want to miss for anything. The reason for that was that on the 31st and on the 1st no car except the ones from “paying” hotel guest were allowed on the Empire property. Otherwise it would be chaos, if next to 800 hotel guest also all 800 employees would come with their cars. You must know that in Brunei the Empire Hotel is seen as more or less the only option you have to celebrate the New Year in a nice way.

Back in the office we worked a bit on our assignments till it was time to go down to the lobby and “work”. The “work” that evening consisted of being present and walking around between all the restaurant outlets of the hotel to make sure everything is ok and assist guest with question they might have. Luckily no one asked Heidi or me anything; otherwise we would have been screwed We didn’t really know anything about the organisation of that night. The only thing we knew was that the hotel was completely booked and that two live bands were scheduled to play that night. All five dinning areas, for which a ticket was 95 dollars, were sold out. Next to being at the Empire for dinning you could also buy a ticket for the Countdown for 30 dollars, which allowed you to be at the hotel for the countdown and also to go to the hotels own nightclub “The Baze”, which is usually not allowed to open but for New Years Eve they got a special permit, allowing them to open it from 10 pm to 2 am. And I must say it was quite busy down there with a really young crowd, I even felt old in there

Heidi and I had a nice dinner in Chef Thomas office, which was actually only for HOD’s (Head of departments), but since he invited us it was fine. In there we had a “nice” chat with our boss Mr. Keiler, who just came back two days ago from his holiday in Phuket. When it was time for the countdown (which they did 5 minutes to early, typically Brunei) everybody assembled in the Atrium to first watch the balloons coming down from the ceiling and afterwards to go outside to watch the 40.000 dollars firework, which was really spectacular.

After that it was time to walk around and wish everybody we knew a Happy New Year. When that was more or less done we had to hurry to catch the bus back to the housing, because we didn’t feel like waiting for the next bus an hour later.

Yesterday, the Dutch couple we meet on our flight back from Bali invited us again for dinner, this time to a really nice Chinese restaurant. Last week they already treated us for Sushi.

And now today I’m sitting in the office again, trying to work on my projects, of which the first draft has to be finished in less than two weeks I’m really curious how that will work out.

First Heidi and I will fly to Kota Kinabalu (Malaysia) on Friday (for the weekend) to relax a bit. Kota Kinabalu is the place almost all tourists go to when they visit Borneo.
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Till next week then,

Bye x Sabine