MP

“Mee Panda (3x), Mee Mee Pandaaa…Mee Panda kaw wa narak, Phom ni chak chak yark ja hen, Yark sampat mee tawa pen pen, Yark ja hen hen mee panda..Yark ja rue man yoo yang ngai man kin arai tueng dai toe ma, Kin yord mai yord bai yord yaah, Rue kin pizza muean kan gab khon..Kin arai gan noh!” That was my part! “Mee Panda” in Thai means Panda Bear. We have just culminated our company’s 3-day affair at the Holiday Inn, Regent Beach Resort, Cha-am, Thailand–with lots & lots of foods, drinks, sea & nature’s park tripping, paint ball shooting, singing & dancing–to us, we presented our “Mee Panda” number very flawlessly with all the panda dance steps & the singing of the song in Thai. We mastered the whole thing despite the difficulty each one faced (excluding Fon, our Thai masterpanda) for being a non-Thai speaker. Reading was already a problem, memorizing-singing the lyrics was the more serious thing.

We’ve mastered the whole piece anyway & assumed that we might end up a grand prize for presenting a unique show in panda suits when compared to the most common plain singing, normal dancing or acting shows. An added fact was that 3 of 4 of us are foreigners (Thai language illiterates..hehe) trying to sing a blockbuster Thai song. But guess what? We didn’t earn the popular votes from the audience nor bag the first prize..not even the last prize! A little disgusting but well, we didn’t blame the judges & the audience for that. We actually made a blunder for not putting more emphasis on a single but most important aspect that caused us our trophy, the elimination of the vocals. The operator/technician failed to adjust the dvd player settings to discard the vocals (audio) when the dvd was played, so, all that the audience could hear was the original Thai singer’s own voice! Can you imagine how frustrating that was? After all the hard work in getting all those strange-looking & sounding words into our brains (strange because the words are truly difficult to say, tongue-twister in short)..that was what we got? We screwed ourselves up for allowing the operator not to properly adhere to the given instructions..we were all shocked from the start of our presentation but carried on as we were only given 5mins. The vocals must be turned off or toned down was the instruction. So, with all the mess, how do you expect the people to react, feel astounded or get amazed at us singing that Thai song when we turned out to be just lip-synchronizing it? Huh! Big sigh, really. Oh, but I think we messed it ourselves for overlooking this important aspect, so sad!

After this sad experience, we promised to learn the painful lesson & decided now to evolve as real panda bears while learning to act & think like humans.

Oh, before I forget, big thanks once again to the Thaicom President, our sponsor! Sorry Ma’am, we failed to surprise you with the much-awaited prize but rest assured that every one present that night including the Chairman, all VPs, AVPs, DMs, everybody, had great fun & enjoyed our presentation so much. The evidence (photos) can be seen on our intranet very shortly.