National Day Parade Combined Rehearsal

I was at the National Day Combined Rehearsal last Saturday...it was a parade which promised the audience 20% of the real thing. And surprise surprise! the turnout was 90% of the Marina Bay Parade Ground.

A word about the Marina Bay Parade Ground which boasts the largest floating platform in the world (well this is Singapore, it has to boost some "firsts" in everything". It is truely quite spectacular which the city skyline as the background. And of course, this being the first combined rehearsal with audience, we were the first people to use the place...brand new...haha..

After the years of experience, SAF has crowd control down to a pat. At no time do I feel fustrated or irritated by the crowd.They started channeling people into the different coloured zones starting from the Marina Square staircase so there was no bottleneck anywhere.

Settling down onto our seats, we spent almost 2 hours from 4-6pm in the scorching sun, watching half-baked performances. Surprise again, no complains from the audience. Everyone just sat there watching and gamely played along with the hosts and at some point, there was even a great sense of humour on the audience's part when the performers were replaced by "simulated performers holding placards" At the "president's entrance", the "president" stimulated waving to the audience and of course, everyone happily waved back.One of the large video screen was not working, the sound system screwed up half-way and still no one complained, everyone seemed to be having a good time...Singaporeans are known for our complaining tendencies, are we not?

The last time I was at the NPD was ten years ago in 1997 when I was a cheerleader. It still fills me with a sense of awe and admiration to see so many thousands of people spending their 6 months worth of weekends training and working hard to make it all happen. It must be awesome to be able to organise something as big as as the NDP. It must be exciting to be the puppet master pulling all the strings to make it come together.

I went home with a feeling of happiness and fulfilment even though all I did the whole afternoon was to sit and watch.