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.

February 21st - Day 9 - The End is a New Beginning

Day 9, a Sunday, the last day for this vacation. And the parents and the younger had to book a 08:30 flight back to Sarawak. I woke up at 06:30 to drive them to the airport. Then I drove back to the hotel. On the way I had to stop at the side and have a 15 minutes snooze because I was really sleepy and it was dangerous to drive like that.

At about 09:00, I left the elder still in bed to go back home. I have to attend Yoges' wedding in Bangsar. I went to the wedding with CK and Song Hua and met Chui Yoke, Douglas and Jo-ann there. The wedding is my first Indian wedding and it was interesting. Although I didn't really understand what was going on exactly, but it looked like there was a lot of blessing throughout the ceremony and the couple exchanges blessing and then accepting blessing and gifts from everybody.

And then, I slept the rest of the day off.

The end of my vacation, it became a new beginning for the newly weds. It also became the new beginning to my work in the New Year when I get back to work tomorrow.

February 20th - Day 8 - Ahoy, Homeland!

Day 8, and we are going back home today. The flight's early, at 09:25. We left the hotel at 06:30 on a taxi so we could arrive at the airport on time.

After check in, we had breakfast at Mr. Lee's Restaurant. The elder ordered another Mango Sticky Rice, and Pa had Rice Noodles Soup while the elder had a Pork Porridge.

Ma and the elder did some more shopping at the duty free shops in the airport before boarding. They were late arriving at the gate, but at least not before the gate was closed. So all was fine and we were on our way back home.

The flight back seem to have been longer than the flight to Bangkok. We arrive LCCT at a little after noon. We had lunch at the airport before taking the bus down to KL Central. There was an American old man sitting behind me in the bus who was yapping on and on about how his son booked the wrong Tunes Hotel. He booked rooms for his father and his friends rooms at the downtown Tunes Hotel instead of the LCCT Tunes Hotel.

The story was that his friends and he arrived in KL and will be flying again the next morning, so he was really pissed about how he had to take the one-hour bus ride down to the city and doing the reverse again early in the morning. I cut him off in the middle of his conversation by telling him that there's a Skyvan that might help them shorten the journey. He was quite happy somebody was being helpful. Later, they were curious about the oil palm tree and he asked me about it. I was quite amused with the whole process. It was really really cute that the man actually have an audio travel log and he repeated everything he complained about and everything I told him into a recorder or something.

After we got to KL central, the family waited for me while I picked up the car at my friend's place. We then  drove straight back to Kajang.

There was a squabble in Kajang. I was tired of being tolerant and blew up a little while. But, being family, we got through it. That evening, we went to have Satay Kajang, then we drove to Putrajaya for second serving of dinner and a movie. I had a chance to photograph the Chinese New Year decoration at Alamanda, Putrajaya.

All in all, we're happy to be back in Homeland!

February 5th - Reunion Dinner cum Birthday Celebration

Chinese New Year is next week! And Star is turning 27!!!

The lab organized a reunion dinner on Friday, February 5th, following the Chinese custom to gather before the New Year. Since Star is turning 27 on Sunday, February 7th, we decided to surprise him by making his birthday cake the second dessert course, without him knowing of the plan, of course. It was darn easy to hide the plan from him, since he is so busy lately with his thesis-writing.

All in all, it was fun and exciting. Kok Wei was the main organiser while I coordinated the invitations, acceptances and rejections, as well as all correspondances. Siew Fen sponsored a home made Yee-Sang, which Mei-Zhen and I helped to prepare. It was very colourful, very delicious and gathered much positive response from the group.

The menu of the night is scrumptious, though the flavour was a bit over on the heavy side. Here's what we had for dinner:

1. Siew Fen home made Yee-Sang 曉芬自制撈生
2. Thai-style Tilapia 泰式非洲魚
3. Sweet-sour pork ribs 排骨王
4. Mantis shrimp yam basket 佛缽瀨尿蝦
5. Hot plate tofu 鐵板豆腐
6. Stir-fried Brussels Sprouts 清抄菜膽
7. Loh-Hon-Zai 羅漢齊
8. Lotus soup 蓮藕湯
9. Rice 飯
10. Pu-Er Tea 普洱茶
11. Longan dessert 龍眼糖水
12. Mango birthday cake 芒果生日蛋糕

We sure had joy, and we sure did have fun. Happy Chinese New Year, y'all!!!