Ho John Lee’s Weblog

A welcome digression on a Friday afternoon from the Harvard Global Voices Project - Kenny Sia crashes the Miss Tourism Pageant in Malaysia:

I put on my best dress shirt and tailored pants, wore a (borrowed) huge ass digital SLR camera on my neck, and at the actual event I walked into the ballroom confidently as if I own the whole freakin’ place.
I walked past the reception. No response.

Walked past hotel security. No reaction.

Walked past the organizers. Nuh-uh.

I found my table (they made a mistake by revealing my table number before I even got my ticket), pulled a chair, sat and started eating the shark fin soup and butter prawns they served. Still no dramas. People look at me as if its very common for strangers to share a table like that.

Yes you heard it right. I got to dine at a 5-star hotel, rub shoulders with snobbish socialites, and meet with 30 other beauty queens, all for abso-fucking-lutely FREE. FREE. FREE.

Thank you, lax security guards!

I’ve never heard of the Miss Tourism Pageant. Apparently, contestants are judged on some combination of beauty, talent, and tour guide knowledge. Among the featured talents: Miss Pakistan doing a Bollywood dance number, Miss USA doing hula hoops in a red-white-and-blue outfit, and Miss Singapore doing an Aikido demonstration. As you might expect from his narrative, there are a lot of photos and entertaining comments. On the not-so-entertaining side, Miss Ethiopia didn’t make it past quarantine at the airport, and Miss Tibet withdrew rather than compete as “Miss Tibet-China”.

update 2005-07-16 23:18: more on Miss Ethiopia’s quarantine and Miss Tibet.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 15th, 2005 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Travel, Humor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.