A week of Hell and Heaven

I know I have been quite morbid for the past week and if you have been following my twitter, you would also realise that I've been tweeting about the Nirvana Memorial Centre and the burning of effigy for my grandma. It's going to be a week of hell and heaven to me this week as I will be working 9 days non stop in a row with Saturday and Sunday from morning till 7pm.

Like what I've written earlier, work was inevitable and even when my grandma was lying in that coffin, I still went to work because I was fully in charge of the current MIHAS exhibition going on in Matrade at Jalan Duta from 23rd to 27th of June 2010. It's the biggest Halal exhibition and it was my 3rd time setting up the Fidani booth.

Wei Mei & the unfinished booth

I have a different theme and design every year. Last year I had a double decker booth here but due to the limited budget for this year, I have to settle for a simple booth like this which also costs RM25k for the fixtures excluding the 10k rental fees. This year, the big boss wants to concentrate only on corporate and wedding orders but instead, we've got quite a number of export inquiries.

I cut my finger while trying to set up the foldaway table. So useless of myself.

This guy scares me. When I was setting up the booth, he walked over and asks if he could take a picture with me and I said, errr... ok and then I regretted the decision because not only he took a picture with me, he held my hand and asks if he could kiss me. I said "hell no!!" and the next minute, he kissed my hair. Eeewwww.... I had to wash my hair with Clorox. When Wei Mei saw him passes by, she asks me to hide. LOL....

If you follow my twitter @ 3iling, you can see that I did a few updates today such as strangling the chocolate bunny and also holding a beautiful bouquet of chocolate roses. I will be updating from the exhibition centre as sometimes you get to see some amazing things that people do, for example, stealing my chocolates!

I wanted to tweet about our PM coming to our booth to sign on my newest chocolate box but the twitter wasn't working. I was just standing next to him and boy, the reporters are like a sea of people! Everything went by like a whizz.

There were some really funny incidents today. A foreign exhibitor came and asked if I was a chinese and I said yes, I'm a Malaysian Chinese and he said "wow, you are very beautiful and you don't look like the other Chinese" (I wasn't making that up and yes, that stroked my ego pretty well). Then another visitor came and talked to me and when I asked them what chocolates are they interested in, he told me that I am very beautiful. -_- And I served him some chocolates. Before he went off, he gave me his card and told me that I am better than the chocolates! heheh... I am not sure if I was selling myself or the chocolates.


This came as a surprise when the organisers told me that Fidani won the 1st prize for the best packaging award. It was indeed an honour to be winning this 3 years in a row. When the CEO of Matrade presented the trophy to me, he told me he wasn't surprised that we won it. I was taken aback when this morning, a judge came to my booth and asked me to impress her with my chocolate packaging and I did by promoting the Fidani Chocolate Tubos range. This is indeed a very good farewell gift for me.

And all the freebies I received minus the free food which has filled my stomach this afternoon!

And the heaven part was meeting friends that I only see once a year. Most of them are the exhibitors that I have befriended over the past 3 years and we get to see each other only at MIHAS once every year. But now with the BBM, I get to save their PIN and stay in touch. Cheers to BBM!