As wrong as this sound, I just had the best Merdeka Day celebration in Melbourne.

It all started when a friend of mine Ash, who is doing very well as a club DJ in Melbourne, e-mailed me and asked if I would like to emcee the Merdeka Day party he’s organizing over there.

At first, I was confused why he would want to fly me all the way to Australia just to do literally 5 minutes of talking and 10 seconds of counting down. But since he’s gonna pick up the bill and I hadn’t got plans for the long weekend, I thought why not.

I grew up on the other side of the country in Perth, Western Australia, but Melbourne always hold a special place in my heart. During my days as a student activist, many times I travelled alone to Melbourne to attend union meetings and such.

It was then that I learnt how to study maps, source cheap hotels and travel on an arse-tight student budget. I familiarized myself with Melbourne inside out. Those travel-planning skills I developed come in handy later in life when I finally earned enough to fly around and see the world on my own.

Coincidentally, quite a number of people I know were in Melbourne over the same weekend.

Ming, Tim and Audrey were all down to meet up with their team from Nuffnang Australia, and I also caught up with Pierre over hot chocolate at the newly-launched Lindt Cafe.

Heck, I even managed to re-live my student days by sneaking into Melbourne University and attending a Finance lecture for fun.

I was so nostalgic that I took a photo of the lecturer. But I don’t think he was too impressed.

Of course, the real reason I flew to Melbourne was because of the Merdeka party organized by Malaysians for Malaysians over there.

I was bloody hell nervous because:
1) I have never emceed an event before IN MY ENTIRE LIFE.
2) Would the crowd even respond to me?
3) WTF. I don’t even have the looks appropriate enough to advertise for a club event.

Seriously! The way they promoted my appearance, it’s as if my name was Paris Hilton.

I cringed when I saw my face on the poster alongside LapSap – two trendsetting DJs from Zouk KL and Kim Ong – a forever poised and talented speaker in her own right.

Talking rubbish on my blog is easy. On the mic I am absolutely hopeless. What should I say to hype up the crowd? There’s nothing else I could think of apart from the usual “Are you ready? I can’t hear you! I SAID. ARE. YOU. READY!?”

And that is just so lame and World Wrestling Entertainment.

Crowd started pouring in as soon as the doors opened. By 11pm, the two whole floors of CQ Bar were already filled to the brim by 1,500 crazy revelling Malaysians.

The crowd who attended that night was impressive. The evening in Melbourne beats any clubbing night in KL a hundred times over. Everyone was well-dressed, everyone was within the same age group and the gender proportion was so well-balanced.

No case of batangs more than lubangs over here.

Another thing I was pleasantly surprised was the amount of kennysia.com readers who attended the event. Had absolutely no idea I have THAT many readers in Melbourne!

Thank you to everybody that night who took the effort to take photos with me, stop and talk to me or buy me drinks. I was very, very humbled.

The highlight of the night was no doubt, the countdown to 31st August.

Kim: All the sexy ladies in the house make some noise!
Crowd: WOOOO!!!
Kenny: All the Malaysians in the house say “Yeah!”
Crowd: YEAHHHH!!!

It was electric.

The adrenaline rush I got when all 1,500 people cheered at the same time was just incredible. Together, we counted down to zero, chanted “Merdeka” three times a la Tunku Abdul Rahman 1957, then sang Negaraku so loud that my voice turned hoarse.

That 5 minutes on stage was quite simply, one of the best moments I had in blogging. There is no other way to describe it.

DJs LapSap and Kim felt exactly the same way. Those Malaysians in Melbourne were some of the most insane ones they had ever performed in front of. Many of those who attended thought it was even better than any Merdeka events held in Malaysia. Haha!

One thing for sure.

Not many people got home sober that night.

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This is a picture of a guy trying to mop the floor with his hair.

Fine.

That was actually one of the contestants from the recent F&N Freestylz Show Ur Moves street dance competition. He’s from the Johorian dance crew Move, who absolutely entertained the crowd and ended up winning second place at the Grand Finals.

It’s ridiculous watching these guys dance. It’s like these people have absolutely no idea of the meaning of the word ‘gravity’.

For third place winner Wakaka Crew, it’s like gravity never even existed. Throughout the entire dance routine, they spent more time spinning on their heads than they did walking on their feet.

I’m pretty sure if one day they don’t feel like using their feet, they can still lead a normal life going everywhere by spinning on their heads. Can you imagine them like, going to the supermarket upside down? That would totally freak people out.

Sometimes I just wish I could learn some of these move from Most Outstanding Performer winner, Muhamad Haslam.

Seriously, this move would come in handy if one day I lost my car keys underneath the sofa.

Anyway, last time when I watched Britain’s Got Talent on Youtube, I thought Flawless was one of the best dance crews in the world. Those guys did well because they move together so fluidly and in sync. At that point, I thought it would be impossible for anyone out there to replicate their style.

I was wrong.

Quite simply, Elecoldxhot is one of the most amazing dance crews I have ever witnessed locally.

They are a group of five 20-somethings who hooked up three years ago. But last week, they emerged champions after beating 103 dance crews from all over the country. With that, the five boys took home a cool cash prize of RM10,000 and a trip to Korea to train with Gamblerz Crew, Asia’s best B-Boyz team.

Despite not being able to pronounce their name, I think Elecoldxhot totally deserved the grand prize. By no means was the competition a walkover for them. One of the team members, Ooi Kok Wei told me they spent many hours practising for this grand final, and even had to scramble for a last minute replacement when one of their original members was badly hospitalized.

Competition was intensely stiff and when I watched the Grand Finale, it was obvious that every single one of the finalists put in a lot of effort in coordinating their dance routines.

Wakaka Crew demonstrated death-defying moves.

N Crew impressed the judges with their funky wardrobe to claim Best Dressed.

Others, like Project Elementz, turned their dance routine into a full-fledged theatrical show.

Deservingly, those guys won the award for Most Entertaining Crew.

Then there were those who were happy just making silly faces at the judges.

Of course, those guys didn’t win anything.

In the end, it came down to style, creativity, originality and coordination. And it’s obvious that only Elecoldxhot had the total package.

Just look at how well-coordinated and in-sync these boys were.

It’s almost like he put himself through a photostat machine and made multiple copies of himself!

One thing for sure, all the dancers that night were energetic and mindblowingly captivating.

So captivating that this uncle can’t help but to sit very close to the stage

Too bad he to had to stuff tissues down his ears to prevent the loudspeakers from pulverizing his eardrums.

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Today is the third and final day of collaboration for Tiger Translate Copenhagen.

I’m updating this blog right now surrounded by 12 hardworking Danish, Chinese, Thai, Mongolian and Singaporean artists.

It’s like a United Nations meeting of artists here. All of them are putting their finishing touches on their respective artworks in time for the exhibition tomorrow.

The theme adopted for the Tiger Translate arts exhibition is “Change”. The idea is to present the artist’s interpretation of ongoing evolution of the world around us.

The Danish and Asian artists have been collaborating, and the past two days have been nothing short of interesting, even for those in our group who knew diddly-squat about art.

Song Yang, a comic artist from Beijing has been collaborating with Frederick “Clean” Dahl, a professional graffiti artist from Denmark. Instead of papers or brick walls, the duo was given a red rubbish bin to draw on.

Although they had only just met two days ago for the first time, the chemistry between the two is fantastic.

Song Yang started out sketching some very Chinese wushu comic book-style clouds and pagodas, and Frederick filled in the blanks with his own brand of Western-style graffiti.

Song Yang is also working alongside illustrators Miss Lotion from Denmark, Hrvrk from Denmark and Antz from Singapore on the 8-metre-long “Pass It On” wall.

The arts exhibition tomorrow isn’t just gonna be limited to those who knows how to use the paint brush. Rom Khampanya, an architecture student from Thailand came up with a multimedia art piece so incredibly unique that very few people seen it before.

To illustrate his interpretation of the theme “Change”, Rom created a series of “Before” and “After” pictures of different cities around the world.

This is the aerial shot of the Victory Monument in Bangkok as it is today.

This is what Rom thinks it would look like in the future – global warming causing the fall of civilization, trees growing out of buildings, massive flooding on the streets and the aerial shot of the Victory Monument looking as if it is crying.

What makes Rom’s artwork so special is that he’s not just gonna simply present them as a series of photos. That’d be boring.

Instead, he lets his audience holds a Nintendo Wii remote so that when they wave the remote over the “before” picture like a brush, it reveals the “after” shot stroke by stroke.

Le Fix is a group of Danish artists working together to build a physical art piece. At first I was wondering why they come to a studio carrying a pile of junk.

Then I was wondering how come they are building a house in the middle of the studio. Guess I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out that they’re trying to show us.

Hopefully it’s not a sign that they plan on living inside the studio.

The Mongolian artists are always the ones creating the most hype at Tiger Translate events, and it’s no exception for Copenhagen.

Sidsel Tuxen from Denmark and Bekheedei Bilguudei from Mongolia are both computer graphic artists who are collaborating to create an animated sand clock, using alphabets from various languages around the world as sand.

But the East-meets-West collaboration I am most looking forward this Tiger Translate is the one between Mongolian painter Ulziibadrakh Sonomtseveen and Danish photographer Liv Carlé Mortensen. And let me tell you why.

Ulzii speaks very limited English so the two are unable to communicate at length. But according to Liv, “you don’t need to speak the same language to communicate in art.”

On the first day of them meeting, the two of them showed each other their portfolio. Ulzii’s paintings are mostly mild but creative. But Liv’s portfolio on the other hand can only be described as intense and controversial.

One of the pictures she took was of her and her old mother standing in front of a car – fully naked.

Coming from a conservative Mongolian background, Ulzii was obviously shocked. But then, she popped him the question: Can she photograph him, nude?

He agreed.

The next day, the Danish photographer took the Mongolian painter to her church, met her priest and she photographed the both of them, lying in the middle of the graveyard – fully naked.

This East-meets-West thing is getting interesting. And I can only imagine what the end result of their finishing piece would look like tomorrow.

Would you ever pose nude in the name of art?

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I am writing this entry in my hotel room at Copenhagen, Denmark.

My “secret project” (which is not so secret anymore if you subscribed to my Twitter updates) has been taking such a toll on me that my head has expanded into the size of China. As the deadline to my project looms closer, I foresee many more sleepless nights and restless weekends ahead.

This workaholic streak in me is gonna continue at least for the next few months. But before I resume this marathon rush to the finishing line, I decided to take a week’s break away from the office, just to clear my head and keep myself happy by doing something I enjoy.

And there are not many things I enjoy more than travel, culture, arts, and beer. Put them all together, and we’ve got Tiger Translate.

This is one of the most unique arts events I have ever witnessed.

To put it simply, it’s an initiative by Tiger Beer where they bring in a bunch of young upstart Asian artists into an angmoh country, lock them up inside a room, call in a bunch of more established Western artists to join them, then give them an empty canvas to draw on and see what kinda funky stuff they come up with.

It is East-meets-West cultural exchange done artistically live, often times with creative, wild and unpredictable results.

Last year during the event in London, they painted the classic black London cab into a kickass Tiger machine.

More recently, they begun selling limited edition Tiger Beer bottles that come with special artistically-designed packaging, and these are all done by talents they discovered through Tiger Translate.

The theme for this year is ‘Change’. Five emerging artists from Asia they’re flying over include illustrators from Singapore and Mongolia, a multimedia designer from Thailand, a cartoonist from China, and a graphic designer also from Mongolia.

Together, they will be collaborating with Denmark’s top professional artists in illustration, graffiti arts and photography.

Denmark is a great location for this because it is home to some of the most creative and artistically-gifted people in the world. One of Copenhagen’s favourite sons wrote that famous childhood fairy story that was eventually picked up by Disney and made into a movie – The Little Mermaid.

Who knows what’s gonna happen, when you put a bit of Asian in Copenhagen?

Let’s hope they come up with better artwork than this.

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Last Saturday must have been one of the craziest Saturdays I’ve had in a while.

Surprisingly, it didn’t even involve a single drip alcohol.

Few people may know about this, but 42 years ago Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand got together and said, “Yo man, whassup? We be startin’ a GANG yo!”

And thus ASEAN was born.

From that day onwards, every 8th August was designated ASEAN Day.

The head honcho of ASEAN is this Thai guy named Dr Surin.

He’s that important-looking one in the middle.

This year, he decided to take the ASEAN Day celebrations to new heights. He meant that literally.

Dr Surin wanted to take his team of diplomats to visit several capital cities on ASEAN Day, so he enlisted the help of Tony Fernandes, who gave him this fully sick blinged up ride for a day.

Diplomats appear in the news all the time, but I always wondered what they actually do. Apart from acting important and diplomatic all the time.

Lucky I was invited to the ASEAN Day celebration as a guest of AirAsia.

Because I got my own cabin crew for a day. Hot damn.

Wish I could have them everyday.

From then on, I followed Dr Surin and had a glimpse into his life as a diplomat.

I flew into Jakarta from Kuching the night before, and the group of us started our celebrations very early in the morning at the ASEAN headquarters.

The flag was raised and the song was sung. Immediately, we were scooted off to the airport where our chartered flight was already waiting for us.

It was the first time I’ve ever crossed the immigration counter using the express lane reserved for diplomats. Makes me feel important. Makes me feel bad also for ‘cos I’m not a very diplomatic person.

From Jakarta, our flight scooted off to Kuala Lumpur, where the AirAsia boss was on hand to welcome us.

This is a photo of me and a very distracted Tony Fernandes.

He was probably laughing at someone telling a stupid MAS joke.

It was awesome meeting Tony Fernandes again though. We talked about the airport situation, and I also told him about my ‘secret project’. He was very supportive of it, even invited me over to the AirAsia Academy to see how they do it.

Our former deputy prime minister (no, not Anwar. The other one) was nice enough to receive us at the airport.

This is Tony playing his toy with Tun Musa Hitam.

Tony Fernandes: “Wheeeee eeekk ekk chkkkk chkkk TRANSFORMERS!”
Musa Hitam: “Piang piang piang! You lose! HEE HEE HEE!”

After lunch at the LCCT, we hopped on the plane once again.

This time, we’re off to Bangkok to visit someone very very VERY important. Someone so important that we had to travel to meet him in this Ah Beng zhng-ed up bus.

Dun pway pway ok got green light somemore.

So who’s this very important person that we’re meeting in Bangkok?

The Prime Minister of Thailand.

Yes, yes, I KNOW what you girls thinking. All the females at my table were thinking the same thing as well.

Calm down lah. I know he’s young and good-looking and all that. But he’s the freaking Prime Minister of Thailand ok? Not some MTV VJ.

Please behave yourselves.

Even I have to admit the Thai Prime Minister is so damn cool. Looking at him, I wonder why my own country’s Prime Minister cannot be as cool.

Off the top of my head, here are three reasons why the Thai PM Abhisit is cooler than our Malaysian PM Najib.

1. Abhisit sounds like Absinthe. Najib sounds like Nazi.
2. Abhisit has no gray hair. Najib has totally no hair.
3. Abhisit led angry people to protest and overthrow his previous government. Najib overthrew Perak and made people so angry they protested.

It was only appropriate that he received a portrait of himself in honour of his participation in ASEAN Day.

Check out that portrait of him posing so yau-yeng.

I wonder where he’s gonna hang it. If it were me, I’ll put it up in my bathroom so that every morning when I wake up, I can go, “Yo Abhisit. You looking too daaaaamn good, man!”

Throughout this whole entire journey, I realised one thing about being a diplomat.

As a diplomat, you must be able to eat lot. And I do mean A LOT.

My entire journey, they’ve just been feeding us like crazy. We had breakfast in Jakarta, lunch in KL, dinner in Bangkok.

It started at our hotel in Jakarta, where I had a full Indonesian breakfast. I thought we might have a long day ahead, so silly me whent and stuffed my face at the buffet tables.

Big mistake.

Barely ten minutes later, we were at the ASEAN Headquarters. God forbid diplomats get thirsty. More ‘refreshments’ were served.

When we took it to the skies, AirAsia thought those diplomats might get hungry during the 2 hour flight.

Solution: Free in-flight food for everyone!

We touched down at the LCCT airport in KL.

What did we saw? A whole suite of Malaysian food sitting there waiting for us.

Straight after lunch, we got back in the plane. This time, to Bangkok.

Tony Fernandes was afraid we might hungry, so he ordered the crew to bring out more food.

Tony Fernandes: “FOOD. FOOD! MOVE IT MOVE IT NOW!”

By this time, we were so bloody freaking full that we couldn’t even walk. When we landed, we had to ROLL ourselves out of the plane to meet the Thai Prime Minister.

Of course, as PM of the country, he ain’t gonna let his guests go back hungry. So?

Plates after plates of prawns! And fish! And dessert!

Instead of three meals a day, we got seven.

Life sure is good being foreign diplomat.

To top it off, the final dish was a piece of dark chocolate with gold leaf on top.

Damn. At the rate this is going, ASEAN should be renamed Association of Super EAting Nutcases.

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