Pham's visit to Malaysia 14th and 15th May

Pham Phan told me that his kids were keeping up with his travel through my blog!! Gee, if I had known earlier, I would have updated everyday!!. In any case here are the updates and photos.

14th May
Finally convinced Pham and Lin to let me take them around KL. Lin was planning to pay for a tour package to go to the Petronas Twin Towers, Chinatown and visit a night market. First of all, Chinatown in KL is nothing like Chinatown in San Francisco. For one thing, it does not even look and feel like Chinatown. Many of the vendors in KL's Chinatown are Bangladeshis or some other immigrant workers. Another thing is that tours of these sorts tends to bring you to selected shops/ outlets where they try to convince you to buy things that you do not want at exorbitant prices with the tour guide getting a cut of the sale.

We started the evening with a short visit to the KL convention centre (KLCC for short) to get pictures of the Petronas Twin Towers - which are still the tallest TWIN towers in the world, but not the tallest building anymore. We arrived as dusk was setting in. Light was fading fast. So the shots were a little underexposed. But the night shots of the twin towers from the park were great!!

As for Night Markets (or Pasar Malam, as the locals calls it), they have them all over town on every night of the week. Everyday, a different location have a night market.

So for this night, I took all my guests (Angela included) to eat Pork Rib Soup (or Bak Kut Teh). This is a herbal soup which is cooked with any variety of meats (e.g. pork ribs, pig stomach, intestines), champignons and mushrooms (oyster, straw, etc), Chinese cabbage and served with rice of in our case rice cooked with yam This stall was near my house and they also served pig trotters in vinegar - which had Pham and Angela salivating!!. After dinner, all of us went to one of the longest night market in KL, i.e. the one in Taman Connaught. Angela managed to get smelly tofu to satiate her watchamacallit.

15th May
This was the night that I had promised to get them durians (thorny Asian fruit which Westerners liken to smelling like shit and taste like heaven)!! But the durian season has only just started and the varieties and offerings were mediocre at best. A regular site that I go to did not have anything available until 20th May - which was too late as all my guests would have gone home by then. So we had to settle for whatever we could get - which was pretty bland stuff.

When we finished, we went to one of my friend's house, parked the car there and went to explore yet another night market. This time, the experience was much better. The night market of the previous night was so packed jammed full of people that it was stifling and difficult to walk through all the stalls. We dropped by an Indian Muslim restaurant and had something called a roti tissue - which is a tissue thin piece of bread (or prata). Look at the length of that!!

Well - that's another night of Malaysian experience for Pham and Lin and Angela.