Bukit Bintang

My life felt like an episode out of a Discovery Travel and Living series.

I tagged along with John, a colleague from our company’s IT department, to “the biggest IT mall in Malaysia”. He’s getting himself a digital camera. We planned on having lunch in KLCC first, walk around Bukit Bintang and eat hawker food when the tables come out at night.

We took the bus to KLCC and had the Nasi Bojari in one of those mall restaurants in KLCC. Nasi Bojari was a humungous meal with tri-colored rice, spicy shrimp, shredded beef with a spicy paste, a fried chicken leg, cucumbers and a boiled egg all cramped and arranged in one plate. It’s value for money at RM20 at a decent place. We trailed it with a traditional Malay dessert – Ice Campur, which is like the Filipino Halo Halo. Ice Campur had a refreshing fragrance that hinted chrysanthemum.

With our stomachs full, we walked to the Monorail station. The trains were half-filled on a restful Saturday afternoon. BB Plaza was just a few stations away. The entire BB Plaza was Malaysia’s Gilmore in Greenhills. It’s an entire edifice of PC parts, gadgets, gizmos, cameras, and cases. John had a good buy for a RM500 Canon digicam with the free tripod, camera bag, memory card, and a backpack.

We walked down the street since the tables started coming out. The red lanterns are lit and it was time for non-halal food. We shared the roasted chicken rice and fried meehon with a lot of pork skin. It was excellent. It was especially all hyped with the bustle of street-food commerce, smoke for the grilling sweet pork, the broken English of waiters as they speak to foreigners, the slurps, gulps and the symphonic chatter of guests in many tongues. This was obviously a backpacker-food preference and it was wonderful food that wasn’t packaged with the shopping mall experience. Of course they issued these phony-looking receipts that won’t make it to our expense reports but what the fuck. I’m more than happy to dig this out of my own pocket.

I had a few bottles of Tiger. The cheers with John went, “Here’s to KL.” My life felt like an episode out of a Discovery Travel and Living series.

On our way back to the hotel the Teksi would fix a price a big as RM20 to Ampang. So we rode the Monorail and stopped by KLCC again for some obligatory night shots of the Petronas Tower and the Menara Tower with John’s new digital camera.

We even planned on check out one of the posh clubs along Ampang. At the entrance, there crowd looked all-too-young on a Saturday night and that made me feel old. Back at the hotel, we said hi to our other colleagues and since no one else drank I downed my big bottles of Heineken while watching Manchester United lambast Arsenal.

Well done.