Batam goodwill trip pt 1

The Batam goodwill trip was held from 7th November to 9th November. Our troop Southern Cross Scouts traveled to Batam to meet the Pramuka scouts from Batam. Before the trip, I had a friend, Josh Teng, that I met in the East area SLC that knew one of the Parmuka scouts. He told me that she enjoyed the banana milk that could be gotten from Singapore and not in Batam so he asked me to buy it for her and I agreed.

Brand of banana milk I bought

On the first day we arrived at Batam we ended up at the ferry terminal where we were given time to use the toilet to exchange money to buy SIM cards. After that, we went up onto the bus where we were given catered food that included a curry puff. We ate on the bus while the Paramuka scouts informed us about Batam and gave us a quiz of the bus to entertain us as we were waiting for the bus to send us to our destination. We first reached the "Welcome to Batam" where we took pictures with our troop for sightseeing.

Picture of me and my batch (except Ignatius he was sick)

Then we got back on to the bus and went to the Barelang Bridge and we took another troop photo with the Parmuka Scouts

Picture of the troop and Paramuka scouts

After this picture, I gave the Dutch lady banana milk to the scout named Thalia. She thanked me for it and after I messaged Josh and said that the goods had been delivered. 

After the friendly exchange, we went to Barelang Seafood Resto. When we reached there was a floating platform where we could see the seafood that was caught and we would eat later. It was very interesting to see the wide variety of sea creatures in the nets. When we started to eat the seafood there was a very intimidating food called the 'gong gong' which was sea snail. It was a very weird food to eat but I tried it and I realized that it was not that bad. However, I did not go in for a second serving after our lunch and my junior Xiang Han eating a huge amount of food we finally went onto the bus to our next destination.

We reached our campsite at Seaforest Adventure, Nuvasa Bay. After a briefing from our scour leader we put our things in our tent and changed into our pt kits. And after, we took part in some traditional games.

 The first traditional game that we played was 'gobak sodor; lines were drawn on the sand to make a rectangle spilt into 3 parts. Attackers would start at one end and would have to reach the other without being tagged by the defenders standing on the partings lines in the rectangle. It reminded me of a game I played in primary school called 'alien' where they had similar rules

The intense atmosphere of the games.

After the games, we had dinner where we were given a buffet of food and took the time to play by the seashore. After dinner, we played the last game called musical cups where each cup was filled with sand, and there we lesser cups each round so a lesser amount of people were playing each round. I remember that I made it to the last three people playing the game and I managed to be one of the winners of the game and got a souvenir from it. That was the last activity for the night and we rested after that

Souvenir I got from the game

We started the next day with a morning exercise with dance to the song 'Kewer Kewer' the Pramuka scouts demonstrated the dance to us and we were supposed to dance next. However, we were all shy and did not be very active and participative in the dance. Many of us were reluctant to follow at first but after a few demonstrations more of us were participating and we all danced together.  We had breakfast and changed into our uniforms. After breakfast, we could not leave as there was a presence of a strong wind that flipped over our benches and made the scout leader's tent fly we were advised to not go yet After the wind had died down. we visited the nearby preschool where we visited and decorated their classrooms together with the students. We tried to assemble bookshelves for them but unfortunately, the nails were too weak to go through the wall so we were not able to build the bookshelves properly

Picture of us with the pre-school students

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