Five Hours

I went for the Undang Ceramah this morning. It was torturous.
Thankfully, I had June to share the pain with me.

The driving institution was in Shah Alam. We got there around 9.30 am and went into the class - which reminded me very much of the Kasturi Tuition Centre which I attended last year. The woman in front was giving a speech about how the institution started and other grandmother stories, so June and I went to sit way at the back of the class where the wall was. (We knew it was going to be really boring, and we were prepared to lean against the wall to sleep)

Everyone warned me that this was going to be a torture chamber; but I really didn't know what I was in for.

The woman called me and June to fill up the front seats. We didn't have a choice, so I took one of the tables behind a Malay girl in a brown tudong. Anyway, the table that I had was scrawled with carved words like:

F*ck You Death
PUT ON THE F*CKING MICROPHONE!

and the most outstanding one etched in red:

HELP!!!!!

Wow, so they really do torture you there.

The woman's (let's just call her Puan) voice was high-pitched and almost animated. When I closed my eyes, I visualized a big blue babbling Doraemon in front. She really sounded like that. It was irritating at first, and June and I wanted to die just sitting there. I thought that it was already 10.00 but when I glanced at the clock, it was only 9.40.
Time moved like a snail. Furthermore, we couldn't doze off or play with our handphones because she was just right in front of us. 0.o

The rest of the people in the class seemed engaged in her speech. They were mostly adults and elderly people. There was an old Indian lady probably in her late sixties. She's illiterate. Her handphone rang loudly a couple of times and her ringtone was this really classical Tamil song with lots of "ahhh~" and "oooh~"s and she didn't seem to understand when Puan asked her to silent her phone. She just stared back blankly while her handphone continued to ring. And everyone else just sat there uncomfortably. June and I just tried our best to stiffle our giggles.
At least the Tamil song provided a bit of distraction from the lecture.

That's the lady with the handphone.
And the dude in front of her was probably in his late twenties. I kept thinking of Wentworth Miller from Prison Break when I saw him. Haha. Well, he's like the Malay version of Wentworth Miller. I don't know. Maybe it's the shaved head. Or his quiet demeanor. OMG. Prison Break. I'm starting to miss it so badly all over again.

During the lecture, I caught a glimpse of something small and black running down the tudong of the girl in front of me. I stiffened and leaned a little further to see what it was, and then I saw a pair of antannae staring back at me!! Cockroach! What on EARTH was a cockroach doing there?!

I absoultely loathe cockroaches. I hate them more than rats. So instintively, I jerked back in my seat and I was inching my desk away from the girl. The cockroach was climbing up her chair again and the funny thing was - she didn't know! It was happening behind her. If she leaned back, she would squash it. Eww. But luckily for her, she didn't. The cockroach finally crept back down her seat... and maybe crawled across her pants and she finally noticed it when it reached the bottom of her jeans. I saw her flicking it off onto the floor and the ugly brown thing scurried toward another woman in the front. Haha. My whole attention was diverted toward the cockroach that I wasn't paying attention to Puan.

So when she asked me a question, I was caught offguard and I simply blurted out the first thing that came to my mind. We'd arrived on the different types of signboards.
Puan: Carissa, tell me what's the meaning of the signboard.

It was a diamond-shaped signboard with a picture of a cow in the middle.

Me: Cow.
Puan: Obviously it's a cow la. But what's the meaning of it?
Someone else: Cow farm.

Hahahaha.
Aiyo you wouldn't believe the kind of funny answers that came from some of them.

You know the sign with a skeleton and a big X over it? It's a symbol for danger, but one of the men there said "Cemetery."

LOL.

Then at 11.45, she finally let us off for a 20-minute break.
Puan: Be back at 12 ok! Don't be late!

But at 11.50, she told us that we would be having another instructor to teach us and he wasn't here yet... so we waited outside the classroom until 1pm. Some fell asleep.


I was studying my nails. Haha. Which reminds me. I'll need to remove the fading polish. =p

However, the next hour passed kinda quickly. I realized that Puan wasn't all that dull. She was actually quite funny and entertaining with her jokes. She even told us some interesting stories about her previous students. I liked this one alot:

There was this man who was a bag of nerves when he took the exam. Puan was the examinor. When he got into the car beside her, he was literally shaking and sweating from head to toe. So on the road, he sort of panicked. When she told him to go slow, he gased the oil pedal. When she told him to turn left, he swerved right instead. So she finally asked him to change the gear - and his hand was groping for the gear while his eyes were on the road... so he accidentally grabbed her thigh, thinking that it was the gear. The examinor got a shock and wanted to fail him - until he apologized and explained that he was extremely nervous.

That gave us all a good laugh. The class started off badly, but as time moved on, things just seemed to improve. Then at the last 15 minutes of the class, she gave us some questions to do; all of which I'd never learned before.

I scored 35 out of 40, I think. June too. Haha. But we lost out on the part about cars cutting into each other's lanes and which car should have the right way, etc. =.=

We're probably taking the Undang exam two weeks from now. Lol. I'm surprised that I'm finally getting over that dumb driving phobia that I used to have as a kid.
I always knew that driving would be challenging, but I never knew I'd accept the challenge.

I guess they're right; it's time.