March 20th - Weekend with the Girls

Every day starts with the first meal, everything prior to that is unimportant. No?

Kampachi of Pavilion, KL was highly ranked among Japanese restaurants by bloggers. We finally decided to give the outlet a try last Saturday.

The deco and ambiance was no surprise, maybe because we've been stalking one too many F&B blogs, or maybe Malaysia's Japanese restaurant truly lacks variance in setting up their environment. Menus are, as usual in supposingly trendy restaurants, huge (a fact which I could not understand) and heavy though unbound.

The food was truthfully a little disappointing. First up, the tea! Japanese green tea is always a must to accompany good Japanese food. At Kampachi, green tea is served in pots and each pots is limited to be shared by two. Gah! What happen to free-flow bottomless green tea? Apparently they were too high class for that. Fine, so a pot of Apple Green Tea and another of Peppermint Green Tea it is. They felt like a big fat lie. The Apple GT smells like ripe apples while the Peppermint GT smelt heavenly minty, but they both only taste the same: like green tea. Quoting Shing on this issue: "Why does it feel like I'm drinking chewing gum?" (Obviously she was having peppermint). Granted, the tiny teapots are adorable and will keep you occupied while you wait for the food.

OK, real food next. We were hungry. It was a 2 o'clock lunch, and none of us had breakfast. Get it? We were really hungry. So anything should be heavenly delicious. Right? Well... We ordered a salad and a soft-shell crab Maki to share. It was too salty, like sampling mouthfuls of soy-bean paste with some chewy plastic (the seaweeds). The Maki was guilty of having too little of the lead soft-shell crab and too salty. Sze ordered a Tendon Set and Shing said one of the Tempura Brinjals she sampled taste like Keropok Lekor. Shing and May shared a Salmon Rice Set. The rice was too dry, and May sprinkled some accompanying Miso soup over it as a joke. The set came with three pieces of fried chicken drumlets, which puzzled everyone, served beside a queer sour sauce which reminds me of overdue laundry :p. There were no cynical comments for the Chawanmoshi side, so I reckon it must have been fine. I had the Udon/Curry Rice Set, which was served with Grilled Eel (My favourite). Shing said the curry might be the best on the table, but the curry only had 2 chunks of potato, 3 chunks of carrots and one single chunk of meat that was so dry and so bland I could not differentiate its origin. The Udon was passable, although a tad bit overcooked, despite rave comments on the Net saying this outlet has the best Soba (nice chewy texture) in town. The biggest expectation can only bring the worst disappointment. The Unagi was sooooooo thin! It taste good, it really does, but I can't believe a ten-ringgit portion (Quoting May) of Unagi is this small and this thin!
Apart from the food, there was a child crying two tables away for the second half of our meal. The child's father had for some reason decided to run an errand while leaving the child in the care of the two women dining with him, who was taken to be the mother and the aunt. A few floor staffs tried to coo the child, probably because it was apparent that he was disturbing the other patrons of the restaurant. The ignorance of the two women amazed me, as they ignored the child's misbehaviour, and did not even acknowledge the staffs' effort with the slightest nod. They leave the child to cry and roll on the floor, changing position and location once in a while. The fact that they can continue to dine and chatter while patrons were throwing angry cum curious cum accusative stares in their direction only confirms that either none of the two is the mother or that the mother was one of those too-young-to-have-a-child-but-had-an-accident-during-fun-time girls. The child was no consolation. He wasn't even shedding a tear. He was just irritably crying as loud as he could as if he was practising to be Tarzan. Despicably selfish bunch!

All in all, it was a huge disappointment. Granted, we were stuffed, but hey, if we're paying 60 ringgit per head, we'd be stuffed eating anywhere. Right? It's safe to say that there will not be a next time.

The rest of the daylight was spent shopping and window shopping around Pavilion and Sungei Wang. Tea time at The Loaf, Pavilion was much much better than lunch. The bread and cakes were superbly presented in form and taste!
It was 10 when we got home. Because I hadn't brought clothes and we wanted to watch a movie together on the next day, we drove me home to pack. After that, I took them to Kajang Satay and Putrajaya for Night Photography. It was Sze's first time in our Country's capital. The camera is not disappointing, with adequate (1/8s to 1/2s) shutter speed and ISO400.
The day ended officially at about 2am, when we finally arrived home, for the second day.

March 6th - Waterfall Massage on Apeh Hill

Somewhere in Cheras (I got lost after the highway exit), there's a hill that attracts many hikers, young and old alike. It's called Apeh Hill. I've pondered if it was because Apehs (old men) littered the entire hiking tract in the weekends.

It was not the first hike up this hill, so I didn't take many pictures as we hike up. It was also quite a challenging hike, so my hands weren't exactly free. Every muscle has to be ready for whatever challenges that might arise.

The hill hides various vegetation, rubber trees, oil palm, rattan etc. I'm particularly impressed with this very very very tall tree. The bark is perfectly preserved, condition and colour. Nobody had tried to carve anything on it. And the colour was that of a very very healthy hue. I could almost smell the freshness just sniffing from an arm's length. I could feel that this is a very very good wood by giving it a touch and a knock. Aaaaaaah, the wonders of Nature! It never fails to impress.

Waterfalls have always represented serenity and peace to me. Those were the qualities that made me love waterfalls a little more than the sea. I hope these pictures will help you understand the qualities of which I mentioned. And as you can see, North Star is back in action as the favourite photograph model. We took turns to sit on the rocks and had water falling over our shoulders and heads. The motion of the flowing water worked like experienced fingers pressing sore spots on our shoulders, relieving stress and tiredness. This is by far the best waterfall experience for me. All because this waterfall has the perfect positions of rocks and the perfect force of the falling water that makes the perfect Spa of the Nature! I was almost too reluctant to leave the serenity into the strain of hiking.

Anyway, this planned hike to the waterfall involves 12 very dedicated young people. We planned to hike to the waterfall and have a blast. We even brought food for a picnic lunch! I was in charge of bringing home made sandwiches. But I was so hungry myself when I got it out of my pack that I forgot to photograph it. This was taken halfway through my egg sandwich with mushroom, omelette style. There was another flavour, which was onion omelette, which was less popular, and so I had the opportunity to down two servings.