chicha and chichi

Week 3 in KL was quite relaxing - just what I needed after 2 weeks of acquiring Malaysian antibodies. I'm feeling a bit weary and much, much vaguer than usual - but alas, deadlines don't go away and I'm disturbed about the fact that my new client is eager to receive and read long reports. Andrew and I have destroyed whole sections of the Amazon the last few days.

Spent Saturday eating, shopping and pub-hopping with various new ex-pat buddies and spent Sunday with Sri who I was on Schlumberger boot camp with in 2001. We went to Bangsar for shopping (can't wait to go back alone and spend hours in that Ted Baker changeroom guilt-free) and later on to Bukit Bintang for tapas and apple chicha - very yummy but now that I've googled and found out it's as bad or worse than smoking, I won't be making a habit of it! Then back to Skybar for the trademark Chi-chi cocktail. They wouldn't let us in though because Glen was wearing three-quarter length trousers and they have a "No shorts" dress code. Fair enough we thought - at least we were allowed to sit in the entry area which still had a pretty speccy view of the Twin Towers. As we sat there sipping our cocktails and trying hard not to take the offhand treatment personally, at least one female in short denim shorts was allowed entry. O well...

I had my first Nasi Lemak (typical Malay dish) - see piccy. After a couple of weeks of thinking it was the weirdest combination of foods ever, I have discovered it really works! Yum.

Penang

Ok I'm getting a bit over this food poisoning malarkey now. It has been a week now! Going to Penang for the weekend was just the ticket - there was lots of lolling around in a five-star hotel getting spa treatments. I was very warmly welcomed by all the gang who were there for a wedding on Sat night, including the bride and groom themselves and invited me to all the 8 course Chinese banquets! Air Asia was great - I travelled in a brand new plane with leather-look seats. The cleaner in the airport toilets (pictured) was so amused about our height difference!

Like Kuala Lumpur, Penang has good night life and we had a lot of fun dancing to old classics like "Uptown Girl" in every nightspot. I'm trying (with huge difficulty) to get used to people smoking around me again - inside!! How quickly I got used to waking up without smoky clothes and hair. I had a fun trishaw ride home from the club on Friday night. One of the crew from Perth persuaded the driver to let him pedal us home. It proved to be pretty hard work! Another trishaw driver stopped halfway back to the hotel and dropped off 2 of our crew saying they were too heavy and had to catch a taxi!!!

Finally someone pointed out to me what the arrows on the ceilings in the hotel bedrooms are. I thought they were pointed towards a safety device (emergency exit?) but of course they are pointing to Mecca (NOT Macca's as the stereotypical blonde in me misheard...) to assist with prayer time!

Coming back to KL after a weekend away felt surprisingly like coming home. Viknes the taxi driver is such an angel-in-disguise...it was lovely to get picked up at the airport by a familiar face and know that I wasn't going to be white-knuckled or ripped off during the 1hour journey!

food poisoned

Yes I can now tick food poisoning off the list of life experiences conquered...
The buffet at the KL Tower is the main suspect and I'm never eating there again. Alanis Morissette would call it ironic - it was the first expensive meal I've had in KL... As a result, I missed a critical 5-hour meeting but I couldn't have got there - I could hardly stand up in the lift to go to level 8 to get some fizzy drink (I found something that tops Lucozade in the placebo effect stakes). Colleagues and the cleaning lady were very sweet and offered to bring me drugs but all I need is time and sleep... and Mum of course...
On a positive note, I've just booked to go to Penang for the weekend, joining a friend Claire from Perth who is there for a wedding. I am excited at the thought of being in a holiday spot and seeing a familiar face from home.
Update: Another new-colleague-buddy ("The Pingsta") has just succumbed to "Buffet Bug Belly", 24 hours after I did, and 48 hours after Jimmy did. I feel inclined to write the KL Tower a dirty letter about their hygiene practices but maybe I won't, for fear of being given a free voucher to another meal at their anorexia-inspiring buffet! After a phenomenal amount of sleep, I managed a somewhat brain-dead half-day in the office today, just in time for a public hol tomorrow (Deepavali). Apparently it's traditional for Hindus to open their homes for friends for a meal at Deepavali, but we haven't managed to be invited anywhere. My new friend from Melbourne is disappointed but I'm relieved - I'm not so brave around strange kitchens at the moment!

fun runs, snow domes

I'm in the honeymoon period of being a new place where you say yes to almost everything. Soooo that's why the morning after a strenuous hash and a big party, I was up at sparrow's fluff to go on a fun run for charity with my first non-work-related Malaysian friend, the very lovely Sue who lives just around the corner. The fun run was a fundraiser for cancer research in memory of an amazing Canadian guy called Terry Fox who ran across Canada with a prosthetic leg after a battle with bone cancer. 50 countries around the world have a Terry Fox run. The walk was in the very beautiful Lake Gardens aka Taman Tasik Perdana (took lots of piccies on my mobile phone but am resigned to the fact that I've never work out how to find them again!). Sue introduced me to a new noodle dish (fish ball soup or Sop Tekwan) which I love and could eat 3 meals a day (and probably will!). Sue is keen to come to Chiang Mai for a weekend and do a Thai cooking school with me sometime. Hurrah - the universe is providing me with some travel buddies! Shealso doesn't use indicators all the time when driving so I'm now convinced that I just need to accept how different the driving style is here and have a go at relaxing!

Later that day (after my first dip in the pool and first training session of MANY hopefully for the Busso swim!), I went with the colleagues to the Batu Caves and confronted my monkey phobia. Managed not to shriek when they bared their teeth at me, and also managed not to succumb to temptation to buy a laughing Buddha snow dome (very good luck, I'm told). It would have looked nice alongside my Brisbane snow dome... Sunday night, we all went up the KL Tower and had the obligatory over-priced buffet while we revolved 360 degrees. Everyone thought I was very brave (foolish) for eating imported oysters...however it was the unlucky Jimmy (who didn't touch the oysters) who woke up at 1.30am with food poisoning. I tried Durian icecream which is the most disgusting thing ever. Durian might be the King of Fruits, but I think Connoisseur can skip it as a new flavour. Durian is such a stinky fruit that there is a sign in the hotel lobby banning guests from eating it, along with Mangosteen. After dinner we went back to AF's apartment for a few drinks and exchanged oil rig tales. I'm due to renew my helicopter safety training but after their tales, I'm not really looking forward to another offshore experience (the toilets in Japan sound a lot more fun!). I don't much like the sound of triple decker bunk beds either.

Sat - hashing

New Pavillion shopping centre (L) and Chinatown (R)

Luckily I found someone to explore with on Friday night - in factI borrowed someone else's Dad who was visiting from Perth! That's the sort of thing that I love about travelling alone - it's do or die (do=ask a 60 year old complete stranger out for dinner) or die (watch Frontline re-runs alone in the apartment and think "poor lonely me!"). We meandered down Bukit Bintang St (ginormous shopping centres, electronics shops HEAVEN and pushy reflexologogists galore), ate some good Thai, swilled down some Singha beer and then taxiied to Chinatown (Petaling St) where I resisted the overwhelming urge to buy lots of Calvin Klein t-shirts. Who would have thought that the first item of clothing I would buy here would be a woolly cardigan thing (for the fffffffreeeeeeezing office!).

The whole taxiing experience is quite fun, and I'm starting to understand why some of the drivers are so inclined to drive badly and try to rip you off, after seeing the "Client's Charter" which is posted up on the walls on most taxis. Here are the guiding principles of taxi-driving in KL:

1) Give priority to passengers

2) Be courteous

3) Be decently dressed

4) Honest and trustworthy

5) Drive with care

Now I dunno about you, but I'd quite like to see #4 and #5 bumped up the priority list a bit. I mean, I'd much rather be driven around safety by a rude, naked taxi driver with the meter on. Actually, would I really prefer that? Who can blame them for trying to squeeze a few extra Ringgit out of expats who will surely not miss them? And in a city with this many traffic jams, if you don't drive aggressively, you'll never get anywhere!

I managed to get an awesome sleep-in today by whacking up the "do not disturb" sign. I've decided that a serviced apartment is going to suit me pretty well, thank you very much. It shames me into being tidy but saves me those annoying little jobs like bin-emptying and doing dishes. Yes I am getting my dishes done for me every day. I can tell that I'm falling back into expat-slobdom quite easily because it's already seeming like quite a struggle to put the dry dishes away myself (the staff leave that job for me, darn it!). I've starting sleeping through the hotel breakfasts too. I've decided sleep is worth more than chilled starfruit juice...

I went out the Petaling Hash House Harriers again today and enjoyed it even more today (I'm still a leach virgin too!). Met a lovely English couple who bravely tried their 2nd hash after an awful first time experience a few weeks ago, when it poured the whole time, they got covered in leaches and didn't get back to the beer van until it was pitch black. The hash course was quite close to KL city and I guess the reason they haven't developed this land is because of how bloody hilly it is - seriously hard work! We met some locals who live in the forest and collect rubber from the trees - I felt a bit blind hiking right past their homes (huts) but they were very smiley and friendly (and even helped us out with directions!). Luckily this is not a very conservative Muslim country. We parked on the side of a bridge for the duration of the hash. Afterwards we shower and change from the boot of the car (the shower pump plugs into the cigarette lighter!) so any prudish drivers-by might be horrified! The hashers themselves are a very baudy lot - it must be bad for a female engineer to notice!). We went out for Chinese dinner afterwards which was good fun. I could be imagining it (Honeymoon period) but even Chinese food tastes better here?

At the on-on (after-party) at Chinese resto. Oh yeh and we saw the 7-week old puppies...awwww!

noodles

I still can't believe how cheap it is to eat here. Andrew and I went for lunch at an outdoor food court in front of our office today. For both of us (2 canned drinks, a nasi goreng with chicken, and a yummy noodle dish) it cost 12 ringgit which is less than 4 Aussie dollars. Omigosh! The noodle dish that I love is called Char Kuey Teow. I think it's one of those dishes that tastes healthy but really isn't (like muesli bars). Yup, I just looked it up and Wikipedia has told me this: "It is fried in pork fat, with crisp croutons of pork lard, which give it its characteristic taste." Hmmm, maybe not real healthy! I had a giggle about a restaurant I saw named the "Fatty Crab" - surely somewhere to go if you need thinner arteries.

I went for a long walk tonight because I thought it would be quicker, easier and more pleasant than getting a taxi during peak-hour gridlock. Now I am thoroughly convinced that even in gridlock and without a seatbelt, taxiing is quicker and much, much safer. This really is a very pedestrian-unfriendly city. At one point I almost got cleaned up by a motorbike hurtling towards me ON THE FOOTPATH. Even at the intersections which DO have green men for pedestrians, you always have to run to get to the other side before the countdown hits zero and it goes red. I've seen loads of cars and bikes running red lights so a Running Green Man doesn't even mean you're safe. I've been concentrating a stupid amount for such a normally vague person.

greenery and good luck

The empty apartment was starting to bug me so I found a plant shop and it's amazing what a few plants can do. Already the vibe / feng shui / oxygen levels are a lot better. The young guy at the local equivalent of Waldecks assured me that I won't be able to kill them - hah! Little does he know that I've killed cactus. He also assured me that everything I bought is "lucky" - hurrah. Now that I've succumbed to international adoption (6 beautiful plants), and that I'm going to be very lucky, I guess I'll be staying awhile!

I've now discovered how blunt some Malaysians can be. A girl at a club we were at the other night (QBa) asked me excitedly "Wow - how tall ARE you exactly?" and the plant vendor was determined to find out why I haven't got married. If it happens a lot I'll print a t-shirt that say "6 foot tall and NOT here with husband".

Went to a fabulous "food court" the other night on the ground floor of Star Hill shopping centre (I think?). I was a bit horrified at being taken to a food court on my first Friday night in KL, but it was like no other food court I've ever seen. Great restaurants and bars 360 degrees around. I had a Singapore Sling and wasabi icecream at the piano bar (both yuk but I've ticked them off the list now!). The toilets were ridiculously posh. There was a staff member in there who rolls the hand towels and turns a large wooden wheel which powers the taps.

And I guess I'm here for work not holiday...so this is what's happening...I'm currently translating a technical report from manglish to english - right up my alley! The clients don't talk to me much yet, which is actually a bit of a relief since I'm trying desperately to get the hang of their names and roles before being thrown in deep end when Jimmy leaves.

We went to a workshop today at the Mines Beach Resort & Spa, at the site of what used to be the world's biggest tin mine. The tin mine has been converted to a huge lake with huge and imposing buildings all around (apparently there is talk of something similar happening with the Supa Pit at Kalgoorlie eventually?). I love the architecture here even though it would probably look a bit silly in a developed country. The resort we went to has a gorgeous "beach" and a lagoon for swimming and a day spa. For a 25RM taxi ride (A$8), the Mines looks like a good little half day getaway from the big smoke. Naturally there's a huge adjacent shopping centre too ..."The only shopping mall you can sail into!" - but really, how many giant shopping centres does a 3 million population city need? - not that I'm complaining of course! Shopping (along with eating) is a national pastime, although lots of people don't actually buy anything. A new friend has coined a verb for it - "malling". I'm staying away from the night club called the Beach Club where apparently there's an expat equivalent called "mauling"...:)

On our way back from the meeting, I was delighted to meet a taxi driver named Viknes who has a taxi with seat belts in the back (including the buckles to clip them into!!). He also used his indicators occasionally, didn't drift in the middle of 2 lanes very often, didn't complain about the traffic one bit and didn't drive at terrifying speeds either. I asked for his phone number and he looked very chuffed when I explained that I liked his driving. He told me proudly that he used to drive for the Czech army.

Time to scoot - there's my room service!