RGS had its Open House yesterday, as did RI, Nanyang, School of Science and Technology and the ulu convent full of lesbians behind your house.

Okay, I was kidding about the last one. But there IS a convent that's rumoured to be full of lesbians behind my house. Not sure whether they had their Open House yesterday, too.

Reached school at 9+ amid a whole horde of RGS girls and a few visitors. Every year there're more students than visitors during Open House. Signed in and got one of those colourful OH badges with a cartoonised picture of the school standing on...the planet? Anyway I hunted for the year classroom but couldn't find any, so I put my stuff down with Sara's in a 3rdfloor classroom in J2.

Since I was early, I decided to go exploring the booths by myself. Dropped by Lit booth where RALA people (particularly Jessie) were trying to explain Upper Sec Lit to some parents who were more interested in whether or not we liked RGS than whether we liked Lit. FPS booth was conspicuously empty (only Ms Ong SJ was there) next to the CAP booth, which was manned by 4 people and Ms Sharon Ong, so I started my shift early.

FPS/CAP booth duty was rather boring. Chinese booth on our left had a whole crowd of enthusiastic volunteers singing "对面的女孩看过来" to attract visitors, and Cherylchan's CD was playing on our right. We had nothing, so we tried shouting poetry over all the singing to no avail. Basically explained the mechanics of Scenario Writing to parents, conveniently leaving out the fact that we're the smallest RS group in the entire school and applying is a huge pain in the ass. Then a set of mothers arrived who looked really interested, so I started my sales pitch...only to realise that they were more comfortable with Mandarin. Excellent. If you haven't explained a wholly English-y programme in rudimentary Mandarin to a bunch of parents who speak it perfectly, you haven't hit the bottom of the Pit of Embarrassment yet. -.-

After FPS/CAP booth duty was crowd-seeking duty with Lingzhi. We basically stood outside the hall and talked to parents about Red Cross, or rather attempted to; there were a fair number of parents who were more interested in finding out how to get into RGS via DSA rather than ask us about what we were supposed to be promoting. Can't blame them, really; how to think about CCA when your daughter hasn't even gotten in yet?

AV was pretty slack. I went to the library late and attempted to find Karmun's two NCC friends, but they'd gone to find Cherylchan so I just stood around and waited. Met Ashlynna and her other student ambassador there; while we were talking this parent started talking to us about DSA (what else?) and RA and RALA and what we do for RA. Sigh.

KSChee duty was mostly sitting in the gallery with Denise and listening to the Principal's Talk. Listening to her speak made me feel like joining RGS all over again - it was that inspirational. I could see myself in P6 sitting there in the same theatre watching almost the same powerpoint and thinking about how I was so close to my dream of getting into RGS where there were wonderful choices to be made and so many things to do. I think many kids there saw possibility just like I did. Everything in the powerpoint sounded so good - RA became "Raffles Academies - Talent Development" (with its supposed army of mentorships, scholarships and professors) and the much-vaunted 52 CCAs were trotted out.

Is disillusionment putting on blurred pair of contact lenses, or the moment of their removal?