Since weeks ago, we saw the banners on the road about this celebration which supposed to be held at 7 p.m. on the 10th of October 2009.  At about 5:30 p.m., there were traffic jams everywhere.  We tried to go there but all of the roads to Padang Merdeka (The Field of Independent), Kuching were closed.  Luckily, I found a parking lot 2 streets away, and it took us a five minutes walk.  We reached there at about 6:15 p.m., but we waited until 8:30 p.m., only then our prime minister came and the ceremony started.  It’s really a long wait. We can’t understand why they stated the time so early.

When we reached there, we were given a red cap each with 1Malaysia logo on it, and the sponsor’s company name behind.

The stage was on the left hand side, and the VIP seats was on the right.  We sat in the middle on the ground.  They had laid the gray plastic carpet on the grass because it was a bit muddy.

The VIP area.

They were still working on the gray carpet, and put the red carpet as the walking path for the VIP.  It was already 6:30pm, we wondered if they had enough time to finish their work, because we thought that the event would start at 7pm.

We were wandering around, they had setup the big projector.

The students carrying flag lined up.

We stood here, in front of the police line, we were not allow to enter yet.

Some of them were sitting under the giant tree, and … waiting.

The other side of the field which was opposite us.

A man from the band were taking photos of the Hari Malaysia Celebration.

Besides, I also saw the police officers took photos with their colleagues too.  The young ladies from the flags team did the same thing.  And I saw some reporters wearing a tag on their neck labeled with the word “media” holding big DSLR cameras with flash attached on them getting ready to perform their jobs.

The performers went up to the stage and did some warming up exercise.  They were in yellow, red, white and blue.

The band was getting ready too.

At about 7 p.m., a person-in-charge called the public especially for those who had children with them to enter beyond the police line and sit in front of the stage.  He waved his hand and asked us to go in as well.  Therefore, we had a chance to watch the ceremony and VIP at a very close distance.

Can you see the guy pointing his finger in the picture above?  He was guiding the crowd from both sides of the field to sit on the gray plastic carpet.  Just a short while later, he stopped the rest of the people from going in.

After finding an empty space to sit onto, we saw three or four foreign tourists sat beside us.  (look at the last picture at the very end of this post.)

We had got a Malaysia flag as well.  We were having a short on-the-spot rehearsal.  The MC told us when we should wave the flags, and asked us to be prepared and ready to be shown on live TV in good looking.

These foreign tourists left the places after a short while.  We guess they had waited for too long.  We kept on waiting for more than 1 hour until 8:30 p.m..

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Be patient, I will show more photos on the cultural performances.   I show you the pictures above with the title of “Before the Event Started” because I found that it is important to know that how many efforts of hundreds or even thousands of people have been working together before they can make this event successful.  A night before the event, we saw they had their rehearsal.  Since we were very near to the stage performers, we heard them saying, “Follow the position last night…”