Chilling before Bali

Well Bali is calling us, and as such we spent much of the day preparing for the event. Sadly packing is not that interesting so instead we will focus on lunch and our semi-dinner that we had in the evening.

For lunch we departed from our carnivorous antics to sample some vegetarian dishes. The place we visited didn't serve vegetarian dishes exclusively, although there were a lot. To augment our veggie dishes we had: some pandan chicken, which is drumsticks which a pandan leaf wrapped around so that the flavour of the pandan leaf permeates the chicken; and secondly, a whole red snapper in a tomato based sauce. As a very big fan of the meats I found both the chicken and fish to be very well cooked and generally delicious, then we moved onto the vegetarian options and the reviews were slightly more mixed bag. The food presented wasn't bad, rather it wasn't my taste: stuffed vegetables, including stuffed bitter gourd which as it sounds was so bitter it brought fresh wrinkles to my face from screwing it up so much; flat noodles topped with fried garlic, pretty nice although the noodles were very slippery, I much prefer the vermicelli type mee hoon; fried dumplings and pastry were delicious, cementing the realisation that I was in love with all the Malaysian food that is bad for you *sigh*.

After lunch we spent the rest of the day packing and digesting, so when dinner rolled around we weren't really in the mood for anything large so the decision was made to go out for some dessert and a drink at this place called Murni's. The dessert place was called Secret Recipe, a shop that originated in America but had sadly never made it across the pond to the UK (sadly). We ordered 3 desserts to sate our sweet teeth: lava cake, basically a small chocolate cake with a liquid chocolate centre; strawberry and marshmallow cheesecake, which proved to be really tasty; and lastly, tiramisu, a dessert I was left than fond of but I found the sponge to be almost impossibly light and I make attempt to hide the fact I ate a lot of the sponge!

We ate quickly, partly due to only having 10 mins before closing time and partly due to general hunger. As we stumbled out into the humid night we went next door to Murni's for a BIG drink. I feel the concept of Murni's needs a little explanation; the shop is open 6 days a week for an ungodly amount of hours each day and never seems to drop in business, even in the early hours. The popularity of this place means that the restaurant has tables running down the sidewalk for almost an entire block in both directions, they used to fill the car park before the police closed it down due to the shear number of people that would block traffic! The drinks we had were HUGE ice blended drinks with some local fruits (longans) floating at the top. I had a mango blended drink whilst Lena's dad had a strawberry blended one; both of which were sublime.

With the evening coming to a close we went to sleep quickly as it was an early start for Bali!