Nuffnang Food Fest 2013 (among other things)

I’ve been a terrible blogger lately and I apologise; college has been really hectic but a good kind of hectic though. According to Elya, I’m a “social butterfly” now and one of the “social events” I went to during the course of this week is the Nuffnang Food Fest 2013 event at Sunway Pyramid.

There was no real intention to attend the event at first, but then I thought five hours of marathoning Avatar: The Last Airbender alone in my dark room wasn’t exactly very productive so in the end, Pei Ying, Rumin, Zi Tian and I decided to go to the Food Fest because a) why not and b) free food.

The place was full of people; and how could it not be? Free food attracts anyone anywhere. Later on, we found out this “fest” was conducted with the usage of social media sharing as currency. In simpler words, everything is free with the condition that you tweet or share a status/like the vendor’s page on Facebook with certain hashtags and/or captions. Hence, if any one stranger happened to stumble upon this carnival without any preceding warning about the rules accompanying this event, all they would see is a huge crowd of people typing away on their smartphones or taking random photos of food while waiting in line to show the vendors what they had just typed or photographed. It was pretty unbelievable to me at first, because these food items came at no cost- except for the tweets and Facebook statuses we were sharing out in real time.

And then I met Audrey, a pretty well-known Malaysian blogger who also goes by the pseudonym fourfeetnine, also wife of Timothy Tiah, co-founder of Nuffnang itself. She was lovely, even though I was super nervous to get a photo with her at first because she was surrounded by a group of people who made my self-esteem plummet sixteen feet under because I was but a mere simpleton in a crowd of famous bloggers.

I personally think the idea of this whole event is genius; in this era where individuals can make a living out of blogging and/or vlogging alone, no one should ever underestimate the power of social media. It was pretty clever of them to “buy” customers for free and get them to do all the publicity work indirectly at such a grand scale. All in all, it was a win-win situation for both parties involved.

By the time I finished touring the whole place, I was already pretty full even though the food they gave out came in really tiny portions. So after that, since it was a Saturday night, we went on a spontaneous decision to watch a movie…but not before exploring the Sunsilk booth at the Orange Atrium where they were having a sale or something. Apparently, if you bought RM30 and above’s worth of Sunsilk products, you get a free hair makeover. So that’s what I did.

And then we went to watch About Time, a brilliant movie that made me look at the journey of life in a different, more eye-opening perspective. It reminded me very much of a Jodi Picoult-esque novel, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she was indeed the movie scriptwriter.

Also, why is it that Rachel McAdams always play the role of the wife of an awkward dude who can travel through time

So that was the end of my supposedly “socially active” weekend. There’s still a Dogathon post to come, which I guess boosts my social points even more? I don’t know, I just see this as an opportunity to expand my horizons and meet more people and do more things which I previously wouldn’t have had the chance to do. So I guess you can say I’ve been busily living my life now. Wow.