1st Primary School gathering in 8 years!

Well, as the title suggests, I attended my primary school gathering yesterday. It was the first ever gathering we had after we graduated from primary school. I was invited to the event on facebook at the end of May, but it took me only until yesterday morning to decide that I would go to the gathering. I thought I definitely wouldn't turn up because I didn't keep in touch with any of my primary school friends and I can imagine the amount of awkwardness when we meet up. But still, I decided to go for the primary school gathering because it would be a good chance to reconnect old ties with my primary school friends. I thought to myself that if I miss this chance, I may have to wait for another 8 years before the next primary school gathering. haha

It was a BBQ gathering at 6pm. I volunteered to turn up early to help with the shopping as well as to prepare the food. There were 3 other people too: Melissa (who kindly rented her condo BBQ pit for this gathering), Denise and Andrea. Because I was late, the 3 of them headed to the supermarket first. When I saw them in the supermarket, this air of awkwardness just drifted from nowhere and remained in the atmosphere. Luckily, I could still recognise their faces and remember their names, or else the air of awkwardness would become denser and suffocate me to death. After we made our payment, we walked a short distance to her condo. On the way, I chatted a bit with Andrea, whom I remembered sitting behind me during P6. She is studying in UK now and is back to Singapore for break until Sep. The more we talk, the more I get comfortable and the air of awkwardness just disappeared.

Slowly, more people arrived. Wen Lin, Charmaine, Hariz, Si Min and Jing Yi. There were altogether 9 people. Well, at least one quarter of the class turned up. It was supposed to be a BBQ affair, but it started drizzling which turned into a downpour and we had no choice but to turn the BBQ into indoor home cooking. We took turns to grill the satay, chicken wings and hotdogs. As we ate, we also started chatting about our memories of our primary school days. NOW that is the highlight of the gathering: Reminiscing the primary school life.

Firstly, we started recalling WHO are the people in class. Names were thrown out and I have to say that quite a few people were forgotten entirely. HAHAHA. Without the help of class photo, we also figured out that there are about 25 girls and 11 boys. Hariz then made this funny comment that if each girl were to be paired up with a boy in our class, each boy can have at least 2 wives. LOL. We also have this memory of our Japanese classmate called Masahiro, and a teacher once wrongly called his name to be "Hiroshima". HAHAHA.

After that, we started figuring out where our sitting positions were. I remembered I sat at the most left side of the class, first row (expected). Si Min and Hariz were fellow first row-ers. Hariz, the shortest boy in class at that time, said that he once sat in third row before, but because he was too talkative, our form teacher moved him back to first row. HAHA. We also remembered how our form teacher gave ridiculous amount of homework each day, especially during the holiday but she never really went through them. Because there were too much homework, Hariz and Jing Yi confessed that they didn't really do much homework. Jing Yi also commented that that the whole class is practically divided into 2 sides: the left side one (where most girls are) is the side who does homework and the right side is the side who copy homework. I really LOL-ed at these funny memories.

Then Melissa brought out her old autograph book which almost everyone in the class had written in. I can still vividly remember this "autograph book wave" during the primary 6 period in which we would write down our contact, our favourite list of things, our ranking of friends and then a special personal message (hope you pass your PSLE with flying colours) for the owner of the autograph book. Almost all girls had an autograph book circulating around the class for everyone to write and I remembered I specially bought a set of coloured pens for writing in autograph book. haha

According to observations, everyone's favourite female singer at that time was Britney Spears and favourite boybands were 1. Backstreet Boys 2. Westlife 3. Nsync. HAHAHA. When this piece of information was shared, everyone was just disgusted by Britney Spears. haha. I managed to catch a glimpse of my autograph page and this is what I can remember from it.

Introducing my favourite....
Actors: Chew Chor Meng and Chen Han Wei
Actress: Wong Li Lin (haha I think I liked her from the channel 5 police series Triple Nine with James Lye. I seriously thought James Lye and Wong Li Lin would get married until Diana Ser stepped in HAHAHA)
Male singers: Jay chou and Yuki (hahaha for your information, Yuki is a taiwanese singer and he is a Japanese-taiwanese mixed blood. He has only one album and I still have it! I think I only like him because of his looks. oh man I am superficial haha)
I forgot what I wrote for female singers.
Colours: Yellow (wow I forgot that my fav colour 8 years ago were yellow)

Urm that's all I can remember from what I wrote in the autograph book.

I also have to elaborate more on the ranking of friends part. Most of the people would name their best friends as "golden friends", good friends as "silver friends" and then acquaintances as "bronze friends". This ranking of friends part just totally cracked me up. I observed that most people would surely name the owner of the autograph book either as their golden or silver friends and NOT rank anything below that even though they are not very close. hahaha.

Overall, I think we sat around the table and talked for like more than 2 hours. I had a fun time at the gathering and it was much much better than I had imagined.haha. Even plans for the next gathering were discussed on our way home! No need to wait for 8 years later! haha