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!

Going Malacca(n)

Another weekend in KL rolled around; having exhausted a large chunk of the best touristy things to do in the city it was time to branch out! With our gazes set further afield we decided to set out for the state of Malacca; the third largest state in Malaysia (thank you Wikipedia!). Not quite realising how far away this place was I had gone to bed quite late; I only managed about 10 mins into the journey before I was unconscious, I really hope the snoring wasn't bad...

Prior to the long drive we headed for some Dim Sum Breakfast, with all the usual dishes being served although there were a few new ones that I hadn't seen before, including this bright yellow treat filled with sweet butter. I will never wrap my head around the idea of butter, on its own, being used as a sweet filling.

The main interest of going to Malacca was to visit an historic site that showed how the old Malaysian natives used to live; it was set to be a very educational day. Sadly upon arrival the dismal weather took things from being slightly unpleasant to exacerbating the bad start to the day. As we pulled into the site we thought it looked oddly quiet, apparently the entire place was closed for the whole of August; we had missed being able to go by 1 week, arrrghhh!

With the main activity for the day gone we decided to make the most of the time available and headed across the lot to a slightly disheveled looking place which was apparently a bee museum. Now I am neither a fan of bees or the stuff that some people tolerate them for; I, of course, am talking of honey. The sole saving grace of this place was it had a roof capable of shielding us from the rain, although the rest of the place felt like it was an overly large garage someone had converted to turn a quick buck. The place consisted of rows of euthanised bees and hornets who had their corpses held in place to show how all the different variants of bee and hornet used to live. The second aspect of the place was some honey testing and shop at the middle of the place, not being a fan of honey I politely turned down the offer but Lena and her dad tucked in; if your a fan of honey this stuff was apparently quite nice.

It feels like a shame because if I liked honey I could see myself becoming quite a connoisseur of the stuff; for those of you unaware the taste of honey is dependent on the flowers the bees pollenated (no Wiki needed here, pure Jack-fueled knowledge!) and it would be quite a thrill to differentiate the flowers that made up the honey. I am going on quite a tangent here, back to Malacca!

With the trip to the bee...place, sorry I cannot call that a museum, we headed off out in search of some culturally enriching places to visit. Thankfully we didn't have to move too far as just down the road was an authentic looking hut which provided information about all the cultural history of the tribes that existed across Malaysia. It was quite small but for an entrance fee of 40p I don't think I should have expected much. Another thing I just realised is that this place was operating a few hundred yards down the road from the far larger, and far better, cultural village, so being able to survive in any state was quite impressive. Again, like the bee place, the cultural heritage site was quite small so we found ourselves completing our time there within an hour.

Once the cultural aspect was polished off he headed off to a gator farm to see us some big ass dinosaur-era beasties! The one thing I remember thinking as I headed in was 'how the hell are they going to justify the price?', if you think about it gators aren't exactly the most sprightly of animals unless food is on the table, so unless someone throws their kid in things aren't going to get very exciting. I was thankfully wrong and found the places central attraction was the gators with a supporting cast of other reptiles and, rather oddly, a miniature collection of Malaysian landmarks. Initially when we walked inside I kept getting the feeling I was in Legoland as we walked straight into the miniature land.

Quickly we passed by the small village in order to get to see the animals. Finally we saw the big pens where they were all housed, now these things were huge and the ones that had decided to keep in the water were barely visible; scared me to think of the pant-shitting terror you would feel if there was no pen and you happened to be by the riverside. As I had suspected earlier the big beasties were just lying there, wallowing even, in their pens and seemed to either not care or were irked that there were people there to look at them.

Moving past their pens we went and had a look around the place: a small aviary, pretty pointless considering the better one we saw in KL; a reptile house, pretty sweet once I realised a chicken in one of the cages wasn't an exhibit but rather dinner for an anaconda; lastly, the gift shop! It says a lot about a place when you are enjoying the gift shop more than the rest of the place... The main thing we took away from the place was presents for the family, which I will not mention in order to not ruin it for them :).

Our time on the peripheral of the state was over and we headed further in to the state. The next stop was a Batik shop which is a particular style of clothing in Malaysia which is equivalent to black tie except, you know... way more colourful. The main selling point of this place was you could make your own Batik cloth and hand draw the design yourself. The way this was conducted was to take a piece of the silk Batik cloth, and using liquid wax, create the outline for the design. The wax acted as a channel for the ink to flow across the silk without it spreading too far. The designs were very intricate and elaborate; this became apparent when it took Lena over 2 hours to complete her own specialised design!

With much of the morning gone we headed off to the touristy section of Malacca. As we were going through the state I did some research on the place we were about to visit just so I looked like a know it all... also because Lena it was a better use for my phone :). As we wandered through the idilic streets lined with plants and small bedsits we spotted a local woman selling freshly made treats. The food was a small chewy piece with a coconut flaked covering; as you bit into it the soft centre spilled into your mouth, if you could remove any sexual connotation from your mind I would really appreciate it!

With the treats wetting our appetite we headed for some of Malacca's special dishes; chicken balls. The chicken balls are just rice balls flavoured with a bit of chicken; whilst they may sound rather bland the story behind them is quite sweet. The creator was trying to find a way to get his children to eat his rice balls and decided that added a little bit of chicken flavour would be an inexpensive solution to his little predicament, thankfully it worked and soon people across Malacca were doing the same. Sadly chicken rice balls never really moved much further than the state, meaning we had to try it whilst we were here.

After the filling lunch of chicken rice balls, and various other forms of chicken, we headed off to the are populated by the Portuguese (and then the Dutch) during the times of old! The whole are is symbolised by a collection of beautiful red painted buildings and a couple of forts pointing both inland and out to sea. Like so many areas of interest the tourist touts had set-up shop, somewhat spoiling the experience. The place we stopped off was the centre of the red building district; the Melacca Church. A remarkable collection of red painted buildings with the centre being devoted to the Christian faith, as brought over by the conquerors.

Having gotten our fill of the first tourist site we decided to walk down to the big fort on a hill built to protect the new rulers of Malacca from any subsequent invasion. Getting there proved to be a little trickier as we only had a rough idea where this thing actually was, we thought about our options before deciding we needed to try one of the trishaws. The guy got paid £2 to take us both to the place; had we been more confident in our own ability we would have realised we were less than 100m from the place and had just paid for the guy to take us round the corner, cheeky bugger. I don't really begrudge him because trying to haul me was probably worth it and I did get to ride in a trishaw!

The next two places we visited, a car ride between them, were both forts constructed by the Dutch, which were never breached by invaders. Both places had a full collection of cannons, all of which were bolted down. Apparently a few enterprising thieves had decided that the very heave, and very unsecured, cannons were worth a fair bit of money so there had been a spate of thefts until the local government nailed them down.

After all the sightseeing we headed off for some food, another Malacca only dish, but first we went to the area right by the sea where the Portuguese had settled upon arriving on the Malaysian shores. After a drink and playing with some little noisemaking things, they were basically bits of paper with some combustible powder inside which made a noise on dropping, we went in search of dinner. Much like the chicken balls of lunch the food of Malacca we were having for dinner hadn't really left Malacca, but for entirely different reasons. The dinner was a steamboat but instead of there being a boiling pot in the middle filled with water the one we were eating from was filled with boiling hot peanut sauce. Whilst it is easy to maintain boiling water, this stuff required far more management, including regular stirring to prevent the bits sinking to the bottom and sticking to the container. The level of maintenance is the main reason why this idea hasn't left Malacca, this is also supported by the fact that most people add the peanut sauce after boiling the item anyway, so it doesn't really add much. In reality the dinner was delicious and having the hot sauce made it taste even better; the best though was this bread like dish which absorbed so much of the sauce that is was, far and away, the best thing about this Malaccan dinner!

With our stomachs filled we headed home, not before taking a small detour to look at the huge oil refinery that Lena's dad helped to build. The thing was huge! It supplied most of Malaysia and the area we stopped off gave us a wonderful view of all the HUGE tankers lining up to be filled. Quite a sight!

Going to the government... for an Identity Card

Well today was just one of those days where we had to get something done; get an identity card. Ever since the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the time dubbed as 'the emergency' it has been required for every Malaysian to carry an identity card for their own safety. Sadly Lena's was getting close to lapsing so off to the... identity card building (I think). Not exactly a glamourous day, but hey, sometimes you just gotta get shit done.

After driving through what seemed like a never-ending stream of traffic and spending far too long trying to actually find the building we needed, we went and had ourselves some lunch at a little place called strawberry fields; Lena had been there the last time she needed her card renewing. The place felt like your standard cafe; nice food, but lacking that certain friendly family touch you get with more local food. Even though the place lacked a homey feel you couldn't really fault the food, to be honest I could be remembering things wrong as one of the dishes was just kickass; chicken coated in fine egg floss. The bite sized pieces of chicken were just delicious, and the thin strands of crunchy egg were fantastic; I still haven't the faintest idea how they were able to make it that wispy.

After lunch we headed off to, what I thought would be, a long queue but when we got there I found it to be remarkably efficient; it could be the side effect of having my expectation of the government office at rock bottom. With our trip over really quickly we headed home for an afternoon of chinese TV and messing around with a pomelo; that's not an innuendo, look it up!

For dinner we went out to a restaurant that Lena's dad went to before many years ago, I think it was famous for some kind of fish? It doesn't really matter because after finding our way to the restaurant they were sold out for the night so we had to make do with another place just round the corner. No amount of good food served could make up for the worse dish; stingray. Let me paint a picture for you, we tuck into the stingray and after a few bites we get the unmistakeable smell of ammonia, apparently the truck bringing the fish also delivered the bleach; never knew the two were regularly shipped together, needless to say we didn't order another one...

Movie & A Pizza

Yesterdays experience with Nando's had soured me to the whole experience of western food in Asia, but my will had one more attempt left in me before it submitted, battered and broken. I decided pizza was on the cards for today, like Nando's of yore I had resisted the urge to try one of my favourite dishes whilst here in SE Asia. Seeing as I had seen numerous pizza places around KL I decided that Pizza Hut would be a fine (alright, mediocre) choice for lunch.

Something I was going to have to get used to was the muslim nature of the country and that meant a lot of franchises chose to go halal in order to appeal to the largest cross section of the population as possible, but in my world that meant only one thing; NO BACON! So my original choice of meat feast went right out the window, no pig based pizza for me... The alternative used beef bacon and was the equivalent of the super supreme in the UK. Once again the awesome flavours of Asia blew away the tepid taste of overly oily pizza. Damn you Asia and the flavours you have; damn you East India Trading Company for being such dicks and not bring such awesome flavours from Asia to stay!

From lunch we went to dinner, with a western theme once again. The place known as Ship; famous for steak and an assortment of seafood. For the first time I can remember I got to have escargot with garlic cheese and it was awesome, I can't believe I survived this long without them! The rest of the dinner was super-sized and awesome, I got to have a mango drink served in a mug bigger than my HEAD! The steak was cooked to perfection but sadly the sauce wasn't as good as Lena's, which made me sad :(.

As it was a day of firsts and the night was still young we went off to Baskin & Robins to try my very fist ice cream cake. It was pretty damn nice and seeing as it is so hot here in Malaysia it was the best way you could improve cake!

A Taste of something Western

The urge was too great, I had to cave in... Nando's. There it is out in the open now, I've made it nearly a month and I just couldn't resist the chicken cravings any longer. As it turns out I should have gone cold turkey (metaphorically).

Lena had led me to believe, perhaps trying to inflate Malaysian cuisine, that almost all sit-down restaurants in Malaysia have Pepsi on tap. Sadly this was not to be the case in Nando's, which I think is quite ironic considering it is one of the few places in the UK which actually DOES allow free refills. With this bombshell dropped the meal would have to do a lot to drag itself out from the pit it had thrown itself off (in my mind it did so into a sea of Pepsi, but that's just me). Things didn't get off to a good start when I realised I had made a mistake and they did actually have Pepsi on tap but it wasn't out in the open, and if you have been skim reading so far; for shame!

The food itself was nowhere near as good as that back in the UK but I have a theory about that. I am now looking back on the meal and nothing stands out as being bad: the chicken was well cooked; the bread was fresh; the toppings were crisp and added all the right tastes (I had a chicken burger btw). The thing is that I have been spoilt with flavour here in Malaysia, sometimes a man does long for the food of home but a lack of it had built it up in my mind to the point that I had almost deified it. Back to good old Malaysian cuisine for me then!

With that little revelation behind us we went out to dinner with a relative of Lena's over from the land of Oz (I couldn't be assed to type out Australia... and have ended up typing far more; goddammit!). The dinner of choice today: seafood steamboat, now we're talking! The dishes served up offered quite a cross section of crustaceans. The highlight of which was having to throw LIVING jumbo prawns into the boiling soup to cook them. To indicate how alive these prawns were, they had to have a plate over them to prevent them jumping across the table; a fact we only found out once we removed the lid. It became quite apparent that I was now becoming quite desensitised to the killing and dismemberment of crustaceans to the point that I was happy being chief 'terminator'!

After dinner was done we headed for some after dinner dessert! Unfortunately that meant road side durians... oh no. Thankfully it was open air which meant I could keep down wind of the smell. With the smell of durian puncturing my sense of smell for some time to come we called it a night :).

Sushi Time Woooooo

Once again sushi was had. For the second day in a row. At this point what more can one man say about sushi. It's lovely when you have it in small enough quantities but at this point I'm pretty sure I could have opened my own sushi shop with the amount of the stuff coursing through me at this point. Although I have to say that vegetable maki is so mediocre it barely registers as sushi, I love cucumber, but a small sliver wrapped in sushi and marketed as something to compete with eel, salmon, tuna, even chicken is really on the end of a losing battle.

With lunch done and dusted we headed off for a massage at a place recommended to us by Hang. It looked to be recently opened as there were a lot of discounts, I wasn't complaining :). We decided to each get the 2 hour massage including an hour long foot and leg massage. Now not being a frequenter of massage parlours I was unaware they weren't meant to comfortable for the newly indoctrinated but the pain I felt was pretty...painful. In retrospect I should have indicated my dislike, or screamed. Although I did feel more manly for persevering and not being bested by a midget Malaysian.

Freshly reeling from the massage some cake based therapy was now definitely needed, with that in mind we headed off to The Foundry for some strawberry cheesecake and some vanilla cheesecake. Now after having my body tenderised for a couple of hours this cheesecake was the bomb!

When getting back from the cake place we were greeted by the tubby little biter, Kiera. Lena's male cat who was given a girls name before they realised the plums dangling below :). No sooner than I had slipped off my flip flops than Kiera descended on them like some podgey stalker of... the day.

Hang heads home :(

Well it was going to happen sooner or later; Hang was heading home... but before she left on that plane for the more seasonal world of killer animals (Australia) we went and had lunch in 1 Utama. The eatery of choice was Sushi Zenmai, a place we had visited a few weeks prior with one of Lena's friends. To make things even better Belle joined us. Lunch went well, the food was good but the service was quite poor. It was at this point that things got difficult because when we went to pay we wanted to avoid paying the 10% service charge added to our bill because we didn't think the service was up to standard but apparently this OPTIONAL addition to the bill couldn't be removed without managerial approval. When the guy turned up he wanted to know why, apparently piss poor service isn't a good enough reason. He said something about it being lunch so service would be bad, okay fine, but you shouldn't expect people to want to praise you for what you indicate is poor service.

After our battle at the checkout (we won by the way :) ) we went and dropped Belle back off at KPMG where a fire alarm was going off for some reason, sparking temporary joy in Belle, but alas it was just a drill so everyone was filling back into the place so we had to leave Belle there and head back to Hangs house for our sad farewells. It was originally Lena's plan to go with her to the airport but Hang didn't want a long drawn out goodbye so we said our farewells at the door. Later we learned Hang worked her way through a box of tissues on the plane ride to Australia :(.

With our goodbyes exchanged we spent the rest of the day feeling a little down, I know Lena did. So when her dad get home he took us out to a Korean BBQ for dinner. The food was alright not great, I'm not sure if we weren't really committed to the whole meal thing anyway. The one surprising thing I found out about the cuisine was that they had 9 bowls that surrounded the main cooking surface which were replenished whenever we finished one; that was pretty cool. It was a shame that most of the dishes were quite bitter.