Sin City

Waking up with a bottle-of-red-wine induced hangover at 6am is never easy, and is extremely painful, especially on a Saturday morning. I had gone out for dinner the previous night with my monkey, letting the wine do most of the talking and later stumbling into the house with red-stained lips and teeth, I struggled to go to sleep as early as I intended. As I groaned and dragged myself out of bed, I thought I had enough time to get ready before my sidekick Liesel picked me up early that godforsaken morning, so everything went in slow slow motion as I went through my routine and finished packing my bags. Only Liesel arrived 15 minutes earlier than I thought she would, so slow motion turned into fast forward as I gathered my suitcase, leftover cold pizza (best for a hangover, yum) and bottle of water to cure my dehydration, and jumped in the car.

So why were we up so early when I should have been sleeping in, you ask? We were off to Sun City for our annual work conference. Some of you might remember that last year I was lucky enough to score a single room at the Palace. Well, yours truly got lucky second time around too, only this time I was sharing with Liesel, which was awesome nonetheless, as she is a party animal of note.

After a 15 minute detour, no thanks to the GPS (I still think those things are useless, use a map dammit! Much more trustworthy!), we arrived at Sun City with about 30 minutes to spare. We left our luggage in the car and went to register, and get some coffee and pastries before the long procession of events began. Our division was decked out in black and white sports jackets, the men with red socks (hardly noticeable) and the women with crappy, furry red scarfs that really belonged on a pimped-up dashboard. So it was easy to see our crowd of people, who made the majority of the bank. In total, our bank had about 1000 attendees at this conference. Surely, we must have taken over most of the resort.

At 10am sharp, we all marched into the Superbowl and found our designated round tables, filled with notebooks and pens for doodling, and water and refreshments. The choir opened the conference, their powerful voices filling the crowded hall. They never fail to impress me, and by the end of the day they almost had me in tears as the music got to me. It was so emotional. Damn, that sounds gay.

We sat most of the day watching hilarious videos (people getting caught looking at themselves through a one-way mirror and sampling food that’s still “alive”) and presentations done by our talented people, including a little Borat video that had me in stitches. I was even caught on camera during this little film, how embarrassing. And it’s true, the camera does add weight to a person…

After all the awards, speeches, lunch, tea, sneaking off to the bar for drinks (Liesel and I couldn’t sit still), we finally staggered to the palace to check in and get ready for the evening partytjie. The palace rooms are truly luxurious, I hope one day I can come back with monkey.

We got ready in no time and had enough time to spare to meet some of the boys at the palace bar, until we got in the lift, that is. It’s only three floors but the stairs are hard to find in that maze of rooms so we got in and stopped on the second floor as more people got in. And more, and more, and more. Some people thought it would be funny to get in as many of us as we could (and more) into the lift. This felt worse than a UNO jam. So, for a tiny lift that couldn’t hold more than 8 normally sized people, it had to put up with over 15 people, some of them a little bit on the porky side, if you ask me. Poor me was squeezed into a corner right at the back, and being claustrophobic, I struggled to breathe and panicked as the doors groaned shut. We got to the first floor but the doors refused to open. My panicking turned into hyperventilation, I had to get out of here! But no matter how many times the person in front pressed the open button, the doors refused to obey. I struggled to even move, it got extremely hot in there in a matter of seconds and the air seemed to disappear fast. Our alarm button was completely ignored by security, and try as we might to force the doors open, it looked as if we were going to spend the rest of the evening squashed like sardines in there. I tried to remain calm and quiet, fearing someone might slap me for being such a girl, but as the air was scarce, my breathing became heavier and heavier.

The worst thing was that we had no cellphone reception in the there so there was no way to even get one of our colleagues to come to our rescue. Ten minutes in there seemed like 10 hours. Then one of the guys managed to get the doors open a few inches and as some cool air creeped in, we started to scream for help. Our calls remained unanswered for a while until finally one of our colleagues who was passing by, forced the doors open from the outside to let us all out. Being right at the back, I was one of the last ones to get out, in spite of some of the gentlemen letting me go before them (there were that many people in there), and as I stepped over the threshold, I almost fainted as I breathed in the rush of fresh air. Call me a weakling, call me a pussy, but I never want to go through that again. If I didn’t have such bad luck with stairs too (I was born a klutz), I would avoid lifts altogether.

So that ruined our stop at the bar as there wasn’t enough time left for a much needed stiff drink. We caught the bus back to the Superbowl, only to be met with a huge crowd of our people waiting for the doors of the Superbowl to open and let them in. So we got a drink outside and waited, and waited. Just before 20h00 we were let in and raced to get a good table.

We had more and more speeches and finally got to eat dinner just before 22:00. I was starving and glad that the choice of food was incredible and delicious. I even had dessert. I was once again disappointed to see that our entertainment this year was Freshlyground. Yes, as monkey pointed out to me, they are very good and a truly successful band due to their diversity, but they hardly appeal to me. I sulked by the bar and downed several spontaneously invented suitcases (SoCo instead of Jack, so what would you call them? Handbags? Lol), I was ready to party as the dizziness took over. I got kakked out for continuously sms’ing my sorely missed monkey, so I said goodnight, put the phone away and ran to the dancefloor once the band left and the DJ came on stage. Only the DJ was not up to my liking. Throughout the night, he played a few of my favourite songs, and whole string of crappy ones.

As I was trying to avoid sickness and a major hangover, I stopped drinking just before midnight, as I was sure my mood wasn’t about to improve no matter how much I drank. I danced as much as I could, even a bit of langarm, but eventually I called it quits after chowing a huge much-needed hamburger at 2am. Liesel was in full form and didn’t want me to leave, but I felt a migraine coming on so I bid my farewells, sad to be outlasted by most of the “older generation”. I took the bus back to the palace, and because I still felt very much awake, I dawdled and was in bed just before 4am.

I couldn’t really sleep, and was even awake when Liesel came back at 6am. If I got two hours sleep, I was lucky. But I didn’t feel tired when I got up just before 8am, showered and packed my stuff. We went for a quick bite downstairs, wishing we could have stayed for longer as we drooled over the huge selection of treats at the Palace’s buffet tables. They even had waffles! But fragile as I was feeling that morning, all I could swallow were 2 little croissants.

The ride back was much quicker (no detours lol) despite running into a few traffic cops on the way. The weather was perfect for a bike ride and I watched as the most beautiful bikes raced past us.

Liesel dropped me off at church just around 11:30 for my meeting with the Spring Festival committee. Once that was done, a sickie monkey, who also partied way too much the previous night, picked me up so we could go visit his parents. We then went to his place and I helped him with his filing of credit card statements etc, which hadnt been looked at since 2005. Men are so useless at this, looks like I am going to have to bully him into doing this on a regular basis.

We went to bed extremely tired, as we were both ready to pass out, but since he had a sore throat, he was awake most of the night, which meant that I was awake too. It was really tough getting up the next morning, and even though he took me to work that freezing morning on the bike, I was quite late. Thank goodness my boss took the day off, otherwise he would have hanged me on the spot. After suffering most of the day, almost overdosing on myprodol and falling asleep, I went to bed early last night and sighed happily as I closed my eyes and fell asleep. Aaaaaaahhh.