The next morning, we almost didn’t go to the Merdeka celebration at Bukit Jalil. We got up, sahur, once again being indecisive but took our shower anyway, and fell asleep. It was not until we dropped off Anna who had to go to church that Aneez suggested we could still go check out Bukit Jalil.
Once again, we were surprised at the empty roads. We had a clear traffic all the way to the Bukit Jalil car park. We had to part a bit further away from the stadium where military trucks were parked. So, from there we were already excited. We walked past A LOT of men in uniform on our way inside; including members of the 21 Skuadron Istiadat Berkuda, looking very macho in their red uniform. Unfortunately we were still warming up our brains from the sleep. So we walked through a door where there was a reasonably big crowd gathered at the corridor. We thought the level above would have more space but we couldn’t be more wrong! Every other door we walked through was jam-packed with people and there were even more people watching the ceremony on the projector screens and big TVs along the corridors of the stadium. So we spent 10 mins just walking around the stadium to end up where we were in the first place. Aneez and I managed to get a good view of things. We stood there Ooo-ing and aahh-ing at the lights, colours, and couldn’t help but glanced up every few seconds at the row of the royal guards sitting macho-ly , looking down at the show while others (even the army) were waving our flags like baboon, singing along to patriotic songs proudly. SO macho! Aneez snapped a lot of pictures of the event,taking pictures of the colours, those macho army men, the marching band, which was fortunate since I didn’t bring my own camera.
will put up my own pics soon. this is a bit too dry without photos :)
The real hype of the event however was, for the lack of better word, the “after-party”. As the event this year was held indoors, the participants stayed at where they were and so did a large number of audience. We continued to sing songs, waving our flags (with a much better view) after the Agong and VIPs left their seats. And we took this opportunity to take a lot more pictures of ourselves at the historic event. =) We stayed there long enough until the organiser came back to talk to the participants. By this time, we were sitting at the top level of the stadium where it was quite steep (and where the men in red were sitting ;D)I clung on to the chairs for deal life to get to a seat. The organisers were announcing the additional day offs for various bodies involved in the celebration. The big screen in the middle of the stadium, instead of showing patriotic song lyrics or pictures relating to merdeka, it was showing comments at the announcements. Words such as “hahahahahahaha” “xyah cuti” “:(” were seen on the screen. We left the stadium after a while and made our way slowly to the car, just enjoying the view of a sea of men in their respective uniforms. We wanted to take pictures with them but unfortunately, our phones died on us & we had no other camera so we had to make do with our eyes and hope that our memory won’t fail us. *sigh* To make matters worst, we couldn’t find any of the royal guards anymore but things took a better turn when we found the 10 PARA gathering at a parking lot nearby where out car was parked. We stood there, looking at them as if there were performing anything, thinking somewhat bitterly about the phone that died on us. We sat on top of the hill, looking down at them until they made their way up and we hastily made our way to the car. And was still looking at the whole bunch of them walking as we drove our way out on to the still mysteriously empty roads
Deciding it was still early, we went to the e-Curve to catch a disturbing movie that drove my memory away from merdeka for awhile. Repo Men. We only found out that it was STILL early when we got to the car. We tried to think of things to do in KL, came up with a few but only know where one of them was at. So we finally settled on Muzium Negara where there was surely an exhibition on Merdeka;before heading home and we were feeling fairly patriotic. I couldn’t help but think, How appropriate it is to end our Merdeka Day, at the very beginning.
We sang "Kita satu bangsa, satu negara" loudly dan dengang penuh rasa bangga semalam. I hope we won't forget that today or the days after that. I believe that Malaysians are patriotic, u just have to press at the right button for people to show it. I love Malaysia!
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