Last Friday, my sister, Cher, and I got a chance to attend a party held at the Singapore Turf Club. Quite frankly, and as bimbo-tic, as this sounds, horse racing existed only in Gossip Girl for me. Singapore? BIG QUESTION MARK.
Horse racing in Singapore goes way back to 1842 (Eeps! Ignorant me!) and the race course was opened in 2000. We stepped onto grounds adorned with massive plants, which depicted the theme 'Racing in the Tropics', and the interior was dotted with beautiful horse statues and paintings.
Buffet awaited us @Hibiscus at Level 3 and we were seated at a table with a mini television, which provided quite a source of entertainment. There were horses named Doraemon and Can Make It... Yeahhh... Haha.
After dinner, Shawn (I think.) led us to the parade where horses, well, paraded. This is where bettors or punters evaluate 'their horses', looking out for shiny hooves and placid, but not sluggish mind you, 'personalities'. *pauses* The horses were actually quite scary, especially those which were huffing and puffing. Being the world-class worrier that I am, I half-expected them to suddenly run amok and was silently mumbling a prayer. Heh.
But oh boy! When the white horses came, it was truly a hold-your-breath moment. I don't know if it's because of all the fairytales that I have drowned myself in but they were so, so, SO beautiful *goes into a little daze*.
We went to the Lower Grandstand after much ogling at the horses (No, I wasn't looking at the jockeys.) and I felt really quite surreal then; Standing in front of a vast field, with the grandstands behind you filled with people... It was like an Olympic moment *nods seriously*.
Anyway, right at the front, there was a weighing machine where jockeys had to weigh themselves to make sure there no foul play was involved. We learnt that jockeys had to keep their weight at 50 and Cher started making noise about how unfair the world was. Haha. The Caucasians whom I have met so far are really tall, so to see Caucasians who were smaller than me... I felt like I was 175cm. My dream height.
We headed back to @Hibiscus after that, to do some actual betting. It was really fun for me, because that was the first time I did gambling of any sort (Felt like I was doing something really naughty! Haha.). We were each provided with a $5 voucher so Cher and I used those. We knew nuts about the horses and so, we sought help from the employees. On our first try, Andy (I think.) helped us place bets on horse 3 which lost. We were like "Awww.... Whatever!" but Andy came back with our vouchers and said with an embarrassed laughter "Umm... Return them to you!". LOL. We were like "COOL!!! REFUNDS!". Haha.
The 2nd time, it was an employee who was a NUS graduate who helped us (Horse 1, Waikato, was our horse.). He came to our table and we had the most entertaining conversation about his job, how 'ulu' NTU is, how all prospective students thought university was full of glamour (It isn't.) yada yada yada. Haha. We were all laughing so much. So anyway, the last race began... AND WAIKATO ACTUALLY WON!!! I was so stunned that I accidentally knocked over a glass of Sprite onto Cher (I'm sorry!).
We went to the loo to clean up and when we came back, the employees had helped us clean up and collected our winnings for us. They were really, really, extremely nice! And they were the ones who really made the day for me. (:
All in all, it was an incredibly wonderful Friday night for me. The companionship, the experience... It was awesome! Big shoutouts to Pearlin and Eunice for organizing the event! Thank you so much! (:
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Here was my outfit for that day!
This dress was worn by Aria on 'Pretty Little Liars'! (:
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