ClubMed

Day 1
Sunday at ClubMed was a completely free day. We didn't have anything planned and meetings didn't start until Monday. We had a late breakfast and then found a pool table! It was more expensive to play here than at Berjaya. 10 RM (~ 3.33 USD) as opposed to 3 RM (less than 1 USD). We played pool for a couple of hours until lunch and then went back to the big buffet to eat more. I'm getting spoiled (and fat) eating a buffet for each meal!

After lunch, we headed down to the beach. There are 2 beaches here. You can't go swimming in the one closest to the resort and the pool. Apparently the currents are very strong at that beach and they won't let you swim. So, you have to take a shuttle or a 10 minute walk to get to the beach where you can actually swim. The water here is very shallow for about 150 feet out and then it gets deep quick. The waves are not good for riding at all. But they do have kayaks and sailboats you can use. We went swimming for a while and then took some kayaks out. There is a buoy that marks the "boundary" you're supposed to stay in with the kayaks and we rowed out to it. It's about half a mile, maybe more, from the shore so it took a while to row out there. After all that work, we deserved a beer at the beach bar.

Sunday night we went to dinner and then there was a show at the pool we watched. Every night here at ClubMed the staff put on a show. It's usually dancing, some sort of comedy skit, an acrobatic act (trapese, ropes, etc.), and more dancing. The shows are pretty good. After the show, I went to bed to get ready for the first day of meetings on Monday.

Day 2
Meetings started at 9 AM Monday. I enjoyed another large breakfast at 8 AM. I've been eating big breakfasts every day since I have a buffet available to me! Our meetings lasted until around 3:30 PM on Monday, but I had to stay late and demo a prototype. I didn't finally get out until after 5 PM. I took a quick dip in the pool and then went to supper. After supper, we went to play basketball. This was around 9:00, but it was still unbelievably hot and humid. The rims here at the court are bent pretty bad so it's hard to make a bank shot at all. We played a game of 3 on 3 to 10 by ones and it took forever. I was pretty much drenched with sweat at the end. The people at the bar enjoying there drinks after the show looked at me like I had 3 heads when I walked up all sweaty and asked for a glass of water!

I slept good Monday night!

Day 3
Tuesday's meetings went from 9 AM to 5:30 PM. Even though we got an hour for lunch and a couple of breaks, it was a long day and I was ready to get out of there by the end! I went swimming in the pool for a while and then went to supper. I found out I could swim the length of the pool (25 meters) under water in one breath! Yes, we had a contest.

It was Arabian day at ClubMed on Tuesday so all the staff was dressed up like they were in Aladdin! We had a few drinks after supper and then went to the belly dancing show. It was pretty good! After the show they had some hookah pipes set up so I smoked out of one of those for the first time. Tuesdsay was an interesting day!

Day 4
Wednesday was a team building day. I found out on Tuesday that I was supposed to organize that! Basically, I couldn't keep my big, fat mouth shut. Somebody suggested a ping pong tournament, but then I took it to an extreme and said we should make it like a decathalon where there were 10 events to compete in. So my boss told me to plan everything. Serves me right, huh?

We were under some time constraints (other people had meetings in the afternoon) so I ran our event from 9 AM to noon. We had a ping pong tournament to start things off. We had 16 participants so I just ran a standard bracket. At the end, Chun Siong who is the director of the Malaysian staff (and the CTO at SchoolDude) won the tournament. He was very good at ping pong. He held the paddle in a weird backhand way that took a while to get used to. I played him in the second round and he beat me 21-11.

Then we moved to the archery range and had an archery contest. I ran into the guy who runs the range (Nic from South Africa) Tuesday at lunch and then after the belly dancing show at the hookah pipes. He hooked me up with a "crazy archery" tournament. We paired up into teams of 2. For the first shot, the shooter stood on one leg and his partner held the other. The shooter shot 3 arrows into a target and then we calculated the number of points they hit. The other person then became the shooter and stood on one leg. For the second shot, you had to sit on the ground and shoot at the target. For the third shot, you had to spread your legs wide and then squat down until you're thighs were parallel to the ground. It was pretty fun!

For the third event, we had a free throw shooting contest. The plan was for everybody to shoot 10 free throws and whoever made the most would win. In case of a tie, all those that tied would shoot 10 more until there was a clear winner. Everybody practiced for a while, but nobody would step to the line to start the contest. I went ahead and stepped up to the line and hit 10 for 10. I'm not the greatest free throw shooter in the world so I will say that the line was only about 10 feet away instead of the normal 15 and the rim was lower than normal because it was bent. My 10 for 10 ended up standing and I won.

After free throws, the CEO wanted to play some "lazy" pickup games. Well, those lazy pickup games turned into full scale wars in the blazing noon day sun. There was a lot of hacking and fouling as people got tired. Horatiu, the team leader from Romania, got black eye when the CEO accidentally hit him with an elbow!

Wednesday afternoon we were free to do anything we wanted. I went back down to the beach and went kayaking. A group of 5 of us rowed out to the buoy again. Around 4 PM, they had a grill on the beach and cooked up some hot dogs and beef and chicken satay. It was tasty!

I came back up to the pool around 5:30 and hung out there for a while. We did some racing and then played "cup" games. We took empty cups and would put them on the bottom of the pool and let them go. The person's cup that came up first would win! It's amazing the games you can come up with.

The show on Wednesday night was right beside the bar. After supper we had a few drinks and watched the show. Then it was karoke time! There were some good and bad singers last night in a lot of different languages. I heard a lot of Japanese karoke last night! That was probably the language that was sung the most.

Day 5
Thursday morning at 9 AM, it was back to meetings. I had to give a presentation Thursday morning. The presentation went well and it was short enough that we got out for lunch a little after 11 AM. I went to play pool for a while before lunch.

After lunch it was more meetings and they're still going on now. I better start paying attention again to the meetings because we're getting ready to move to a breakout session where I'll have to participate. I just wanted to finally get out of some of what's been happening at ClubMed.