I woke up not thinking any different. I had actually forgotten that it was my birthday until my cousin greeted me in the morning. I don’t place importance on dates (women can all hate me now) because I believe in living every day to the fullest. So I didn’t even plan to celebrate or whatever, but things have a way of organising themselves.
The day started off with lunch in Jalan Alor with Phil at this old decrepit building. In fact I deem it too decrepit for foreigners. Only true Malaysians and the adventurous would venture inside and actually eat something. The place is how should I put it – not the cleanest and it looks like it could fall apart at anytime. Hahah!
The food however looked good and it was what the place is known for, especially the charsiew that literally melted in your mouth. Woo.
After lunch, we headed to Lecka Lecka again for beer and bird watching. And then Phil suggested we go for a massage. Sounds like a plan!
The area where we headed to have a lot of foot/body massage parlours, with spruikers on the sidewalk trying to get us to go in. However, we were headed to a nicer one which Phil had been meaning to try out.
The masseuses were mainland Chinese women and were quite chatty and I had a chance to practice my Mandarin. After the massage, I felt really really relaxed. At RM50 for 45 minutes of full body massage it was well worth it.
After a quick Japanese dinner at Rakuzen, we headed home to get ready to go out with my aunty’s gay friends. Hahah yes you read that right. The night started off at Frangipani for a quick drink before we made it to Zouk for a gay event.
I took a lot of photos on the night. But because we are dealing with a very sensitive aspect of people’s lives, I am not going to post photos showing the faces of the people that I partied with. Hopefully what I get to show you and how I describe it would be a good consolation.
So there I was drinking and jumping around with this big bunch of obviously gay men at a gay event, when I chatted up this cute girl. She thought I was gay too. For some reason, I didn’t correct her and I just played along. And after a while I soon realised the benefit of having a girl think that you are gay: you get to touch them, hug them and squeeze them all you like. Woohoo! Of course the downside is she doesn’t think of you in a sexual way. And she was single too. Oh well.
The end result of the night was me getting my shirt taken off by another man. I have to say that this has to be my most unique birthday celebration yet. And no I’m not gay, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Dearth of activities led to a dearth of photos. Plus the internet traffic jam is not encouraging any blogging juice. The most interesting thing in the past few days have been to Low Yat Plaza to get some PC parts for my cousin. Wee. No hotchicks there though.
But being Internet deprived got my cousins and I back to enjoying the things before computers came along, like TV. Hahaha! I kid. We managed to go out and walk about, and even got off our asses from the cartoons (yes I watch them) to go sit our asses in the pool. That’s my effort into correcting my non-existent exercise routine since I’ve got here.
And I think I need it. All that drinking and eating ain’t good for maintaining that lean look. Woohoo. And btw, I’m 32 today.
UPDATE 9:00pm What the … it works again. Maybe they’ve allowed access for off-peak hours then. Beggars can’t be choosers.
UPDATE 2:47pm Scratch that. Presumably after a torrent of traffic heading through their way, the Australian proxy servers have stopped all non-Australian connections to it. Still, the tips below are applicable if you ever need to surf the net anonymously.
To net surfers in the South-East Asian region, you can get around the current Internet traffic jam for your web-browsing by using a proxy server in Australia. Australia has a submarine cable running out from Sydney straight to the west coast of the US. It’s still slower than normal but it’s a damn sight faster than you trying to get through to the US/Europe via the damaged cables around Taiwan.
Here’s the list of servers which I’ve found off Google. Take note of the ones in Australia.
For Firefox users:
Click on Tools – Options.
Click on the Advanced tab.
Click on “Settings”.
Check the “Manual Proxy Configuration” option.
Enter the IP address and port number as noted from the list.
For IE users:
Click on Tools – Internet Options.
Click on the Connections tab.
Click on “LAN Settings”.
Check the “Use a proxy server for your LAN” option.
Enter the IP address and port number as noted from the list.
Happy surfing!
(tip came from Jeff Ooi. Why didn’t I think of that? )
International links to sites hosted outside of South-East Asia are severely crippled due to an underwater earthquake off the coast of Taiwan, which damaged an underwater communication cable.
Since my blog is hosted in the US, posting this was painfully slow. So I won’t be attempting new posts until the situation gets better. It should hopefully improve enough before I fly back next Friday. Oh minor update – I didn’t do much for the past three days.
I dunno what I will be doing for NYE yet because a few options are available to me. The day before that I may take a road trip down to Melaka with YC if there’s room in the cars of her group. Her DJing friends have a NYE show down that way, and will be checking out the venue and equipment. If I do get to go with them, it should provide some photos and blogging material.
Until whenever, have a safe and drunken holiday season wherever you are.
There are many places where you can get information about Malaysia. For example, the CIA World Factbook, Wikipedia, and BBC’s country profiles. I’m gonna present the Malaysia that I know in a nutshell from my point of view, and based around questions people have asked me or have misperceived about Malaysia.
It’s a former British colony, like India and Hong Kong.
The three majority racial groups in descending % of the population: Malay, Chinese, and Indian. Other minority groups include the native peoples and Eurasians.
“Malay” is not the same as “Malaysian”. You don’t call a Malaysian citizen a “Malay”.
It is a Muslim country but there is freedom of religion. Major public holidays revolve around the religious festivals of Islam, Buddhism/Chinese, Christianity and Hinduism.
By law and tradition, all Malays are compelled to be Muslims at least on a superficial level.
Alcohol is allowed for non-Muslims, and not all Muslim women wear a headscarf.
Illicit drugs and recreational drugs are illegal and will attract severe punishment. Best not to dabble with it while you are in the country. Nightclub raids occur from time to time.
Although there isn’t as much intermingling of the races on a social level, there is intermingling day to day in shops and restaurants, commercial dealings and government offices.
The national language is “Bahasa Malaysia”, also colloquially called “Malay”. English is widely spoken and taught in schools. Most Malaysians are at least bilingual.
Every one eats the food of all other races, and there is much fusion of recipes and ingredients.
Police bribery and corruption is a norm and accepted by the populace, especially when dealing with traffic offenses. The police are lowly paid: salaries start at RM800 a month, compared to the RM1200 and above of an entry-level office job for educated professionals.
Yesterday – day 3. Went out with my cousin Kelvin for lunch and drinks around the Bintang Walk area. We caught up about his life since he moved back to KL from Perth a year ago, the IT job market and naturally, women. This is Lecka Lecka by day.
Went home for dinner around 7pm. After dinner we freshened up to get ready to go out for the Mambo Jambo night / Christmas Eve party at Zouk KL where we were meeting some of my aunty Cass’ friends. The Petronas Twin Towers is on the way there, and it’s always awe-inspiring to see it up close.
I’ve taken shots similar to these two below but it’s such nice surroundings.
Mambo Jambo night is where they play retro music along with current ones. The DJ on the night was excellent – the mixing flowing seamlessly through songs from different eras. In fact, I wished they had something similar in Perth, on a regular basis in a big club like Metro Perth. The annual ones organised by the Singaporean Students’ Union don’t count.
We had lots of drinks and all of us danced our heads off. I will let the photos do the talking for the rest of this post.
And here’s a bonus for you: an 8-minute highlight clip of the night, including a segment with hot chicks on a podium. Get to it!
Yesterday – day 2. The going-ons picked up a little in pace and so does the photo-taking. Let’s get to it. Morning was waking up to a bowl of curry mee, or laksa. Look at that and drool.
After lunch my cousins headed to Sungei Wang together with my aunty. Once there, first priority was getting a prepaid SIM card. Much cheaper than using roaming especially when you have to be in a place for more than a few days. And then somewhat predictably, we headed off to the arcade in Berjaya Times Square.
After much fun and frivolity reliving my precious youth with my 14 year old cousin, it was time to meet up with Yue-Chin to head off for dinner at The Green Lotus. She and I were the first to be there at 7:50pm.
The guest of honour – Mili and her husband Simon visiting from the UK, and the rest arrived a little bit later. Mili’s good friend Audrey whose blog I have also been reading was there, along with a few people who I managed to got along with really well. They were a riot.
It was very good to have met Mili in person at long last after knowing each other online for 1.5 years through each other’s blogs. This was the first time that Yue-Chin is meeting Mili too.
YC wanted me to put these two photos side-by-side: the one on the left is from last year. Yes she still has that stretchiness.
Living up to her reputation of being a big eater (who doesn’t gain weight), we took a short walk up the road to Lecka Lecka where YC got some ice-cream for dessert.
After milling around deciding where to go, we settled on Bed located on the Asian Heritage Row. Only problem was for some reason the door bitch didn’t want to let our group in. I wasn’t privy to the conversation but the end result was that we ordered a bottle of Chivas and had it at their outside bar instead. Yue-Chin left us to join her friends at another club around this time.
It was a blessing in disguise that we didn’t get in because I think we had more fun sitting outside a round table where we could talk to each other normally. Mili really got into the drinks, drinking like she wasn’t going to touch alcohol again. “Whatever happens in Bed, stays in Bed.” Heh.
Here she is pouring us another round of drinks and yelling, “Drink up!”
This is Asian Heritage Row the left, and with my new found friends Simon, Justin and Elvin. Mili titled me the “friends poacher” because I hit it off with her friends almost immediately.
We finished off the bottle of Chivas after about an hour and a half. During which time we got hungry. As is typical of all Malaysian nightspots, there is a “mamak” or Indian-Muslim food stall nearby. So naturally that was where we gravitated towards. Among other things, we had maggi goreng, satay, nasi lemak and teh-tarik.
So ends another day in Malaysia. I might spend New Year’s Eve with my new found friends.
