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Published: September 20th 2016
Saturday 10th September, 2016 We began our journey to Malaysia by leaving a cold and wet Melbourne at 6.45am. We sadly said goodbye to Mango at home as we couldn’t take him in the car with us to the airport as Gav was dropping us off on the way to work. It was very hard to leave him as we know he won’t understand where we’ve gone or that we’ll be away so long etc!
The airport check-in and customs etc went very quickly and smoothly – I’m sure this gets better each year that we travel! The flight itself seemed very quick even though it was close to 9 hours. It was full of kids but they weren’t any trouble at all – actually quite entertaining! We watched a couple of movies and before we knew it we had arrived in KL at 4pm local time (2 hours behind Melbourne). Again, it only took us half an hour to get through immigration – although we did have two very annoying foreigners behind us in the queue. For some reason, the guy, even though the queue was spread out, decided he had to keep nudging us forward!!! I kept
my patience but did ‘do a Gav’ and decided to nudge backwards myself!
We were met at KL airport by Janet and Daniel – our past neighbours who are now living in KL. We will be staying with them for 2 nights before heading to the gorgeous island of Penang for five nights, then back with them for another two. It was so good to see them after 10 years when we had last caught up with them in Brisbane. The funny thing is that when they used to live next door to us (in what is now Charmaine and Trevor’s house) we always used to chat and laugh over the fence when we were all having our family barbeques but we didn’t actually get together until their farewell drinks when they left to move to Brisbane!
After we met up at the airport, Daniel drove us to their gorgeous home in the KL suburb of Bukit Damansara (8km downtown). Janet described the suburb as a sort of ‘Beverly Hills’ of KL but with their house being the ‘hovel’ amongst the ‘mansions’ – we beg to disagree! Their home is lovely – a two storey warm, cosy home
with a distinct Asian cross South African ambiance (they are South African) – big open spaces overlooking a beautiful garden with a pool with local squirrels and luckily for us at the time, a family of silver leaf monkeys in their trees. The surrounding houses however were mansions that personally I would never want to live in! Mia and I both said that we wanted to move to KL and into their home – we were in love with it!
We sat outside for a while catching up over a drink or two before heading into Chinatown for dinner at the ‘Old China Café’ – a beautifully restored pre-war shophouse that serves Baba Nyonya (Straights Chinese/Peranakan) food which we love! (Nyonya cuisine comes from the Peranakans, descendants of early Chinese migrants who settled in Malacca, Penang - both in Malaysia and places we’ll be travelling to - Singapore and Indonesia inter-marrying with local Malays and combines Chinese, Malay and other influences)
We feasted on beef rendang (slow cooked beef in coconut), kari kapitan ayam (chicken curry), blue coconut rice (the blue comes from the blue pea flower), char kway teow (stir fried rice noodles), onion omelet, kalian (steamed
Chinese broccoli in oyster sauce), and for dessert, sago gula melaka (sago pearls in coconut milk with palm sugar syrup) all delicious!
Afterwards we walked up and down the markets of ‘Petaling Street’ in Chinatown. I’d always thought that Petaling Street was a food street, probably because there is a local Malaysian restaurant in Box Hill of the same name. But no… It is all just your normal, Chinatown junk markets! A funny night though, mingling with the store holders – all of them calling out to Janet as ‘hello beautiful, young lady!’ (Janet’s around 55), to Mia as ‘Hello baby…’ (she’s now 14) and I was happily ignored! (When I say that, they all smiled at me but didn’t bother addressing me – I’m sure they could instantly tell from the minute we locked eyes that they had no hope of selling me anything, so why bother?!) Janet was hilarious – intermingling with comments such as ‘I wouldn’t let you pay me to buy that – it’s dreadful!’ Needless to say, we were in hysterics! Please note, the stall holders were laughing too!
Reasonable early to bed (10pm local time/midnight Aus time) as we were
both exhausted!
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Janet Scott
non-member comment
Great post
Hi Shell & Mia, Such fun to be featured in your blog! You captured your short visit with us perfectly and it was awesome having you to stay. Looking forward to reading the about the rest of your visit and picking up a few tips. xxx