Hi. I promised I would post this, so here you go.

After the qualifier in Tangerang, we went to Malaysia on October 6th-9th to compete in Astro Asian Battleground 2016 with other crews in Asia, including Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea, Japan, and India. How cool is that?

When we arrived, we went straight to our hotel, Dorsett Hotel. It's the first time in my dance journey to be accomodated with 4-star hotel. That's just so generous for a dance event organizer. Well it's TV show, what did you expect? We met a lot of dancers. We created a short video for our intro, sharing about why we dance. Along this trip, I was forced to speak English a lot. Which is REALLY GOOD for me since I need some improvement in spoken English.

The first and second days were full of general rehearsals. We repeated our concept for a lot of times, rehearsed about how we enter and exit the stage, where we should face when doing this, when doing that, where we should stand during announcement, et cetera, et cetera. Wow, extreme details, I thought. It sure isn't an easy task to be TV program producer.

Along the rehearsals, we watched other countries bringing out the best of them. Every country has different style of dance, has different strength and uniqueness. And it just ignited sparks in us whenever we watched each other dancing our own concepts. We start to get this pressure, anxiety, and at the same time fire to perform our very very best and exceed our limit. We used to compete with people in Indonesia, and then this was just a whole different story.

A lot of unexpected misfortune happened in the 4 days journey. Some from external circumstances, and some from our own negligance. I, being me, over-organized everything. I kind of wanted everything to just go perfectly without any flaw. But you can't expect that from a journey you know nothing about. Even when we prepared this and that, there's still a lot o things that are outside our expectations.

On the other hand, we didn't only get to know dancers from other countries, but also know each other deeper. Every night, we evaluated and prayed. How we could improve the dance. How we could improve our attitude in this competition, our positioning. What we should do to be a better representation for Indonesia in front of other countries. We learned a lot of lessons not just in skills, but also mentally and morally.

The 2 days felt really long (imagine waiting for 13 other crews to rehearse, then start over again and again till midnight!), but the awaited day finally came. A lot of supports started to pour in; on Instagram, LINE, and other platforms. Showed how much people around us supported us. It gave us strength, confidence.

As much as we wanted to win this, to at least bring Top 4 to the name of our country, I sticked with my same mindset. The ultimate focus is not winning. It's always been to give very best of you. If we focus on winning, we would focus on outrunning other crews. But when we focus on ourself, to just enjoy the music, give the very best, and pour our heart out, it will all come out naturally. In the end, performing our best is the goal, and winning is always just a bonus.

Overall, it was a really valuable experience.

Thank God for this overwhelming opportunity. Believe it or not, it was one of my 2016 goal to join an international dance competition. (I wrote it here!). Now it's checked off the list. And I have another beautiful thing to share from my whole dance journey later. God always has His own beautiful way to make things happen, doesn't He?

Thank you to my team: Kak Black, MP, Bobby, Edope for the sacrifices and hard work to exceed the limits, our temporary manager Wisnu, our leader Ko Edo, and everyone who gave their support.

More to come! :)