Thank God For Holidays

Ipoh mari...

The past few days have been a welcome respite from the usual hustle and bustle of life. Looking back, I regret not taking leave on Monday. Not like I had a choice though, I had to go all the way to Jelapang, Ipoh to visit a client's factory. Which by the way, has got to be the crappiest factory I've ever seen in my life!

The whole factory has the look and feel of a deserted warehouse. Pretty creepy. It reminds me of those huge, lifeless factories in B-grade action movies where the Hero faces off against the evil-to-the-bone villian.

The floor of the factory was greasy, the lighting was dim, the furnitue was dingy, and the people working in it looked like they've never seen the sun in years. It's something out of Village of the Damned, where hordes of lifeless, half-zombies shuffle around the place, oblivious to the rest of the world.

The ironic thing is, the factory manufactures soap. Yup, the little white bars which you use to keep yourself clean.

I'll never look at another bar of soap the same way again.


If only we had more Sultans...

Anyway enough about work. The past few days have been pretty entertaining. Not only did I manage to get quite a lot of work done (personal work lah ah-buh-then, you think I'll do office work on a holiday??), but I finally got to catch up on some much needed R&R.

Ahhhh, if only we had more sultans celebrating their birthdays throughout the year. See, we should be glad that in spite of how useless our royal families seem to be, there is at least one good reason for having them around...hahah.


Scouting for Apparel

On Saturday morning, a few friends and I went down to Jalan San Peng to source for some apparel for our proposed retail shop. For those of you who don't know, the place is pretty cool. They have practically everything you can think of in terms of textiles and apparel.





Rows and rows of apparel wholesalers line the streets, with each of them hawking a variety of funky looking clothing. Alright, most of the stuff there are pretty ah beng, but if you look hard enough, there are quite a few gems waiting to be uncovered. Some of the shops had really dodgy looking mannequins like the ones shown above. Needless to say, my friend Jon's fetish for dodgy mannequins began to manifest itself.




One thing about Malaysians though, we aren't great at coming up with names. Don't believe me? Just take a walk around Sg Wang or something. The names of the stores are mediocre at best, and downright nasty at worst.

Take the store below for example. Why would anyone call their store 'Good'? How boring, if I had a clothing store I'd probably call it 'Bernard's House of Amazingly Skimy Clothing!' (yup, including the exclamation mark). See? Isn't my idea so much better? Amazing how with just a few simple changes, a name like 'Good' can be changed into something so much more powderful eh.

I'm a marketing god!



Not to be outdone, another shop just a few rows down named itself 'Good Luck'.



Who is the person with the amazingly good looks here, is it both You and Me?.....



Nope, it's just me...hahah, lame.



We finished by noon, and by then we were tired, hot, sweaty and hungry. Ah well, nothing like a good morning of trekking up and down rows and rows of funny sounding stores to work up an appetite.




Portraits 'R' Us

Next up, we went over to Central Market to check out the prices of their hand drawn portraits. Malaysia, being a land of exotic-ness (well, according to the ang mohs lah) and cheap labour, we saw the potential in selling these stuff overseas through the Internet. No concrete plans have been made yet though, but it looks pretty promising. Only time and more research will tell.



These abstract pieces of art are supposedly very 'hot' amongst the ang moh tourists. It sells much better than those traditional portraits. I guess its because there are already loads of portrait artists over in the West, but how many of them can actually do authentic Asian/Balinese/Indochina-ish style caricatures eh.



Here's a friendly artist who provided us with quite a bit of useful information. Also, the picture of Gandhi below is made up entirely of dots! Pretty impressive. I know I must be really outdated, but it's my first time seeing such a technique.




Dining at Eden

On Saurday night, my friends and I initially planned on having dinner at some place in KL. Turns, there was some function going on there and the place will only be open to the public 2 hours later. Two hours later?? Asking a Malaysian to wait for 2 hours for food is almost like asking NASA to delay the launch of their space shuttle because a few of their launch technicians have gone for a tea break. Impossible!

In the end, hunger took over and we went over to Eden for our food.











Ever wondered how handphones are made? Well, wonder no more.



Table manners? What table manners? *urppp*. Here I am chomping down on some poor ox's tail. Ahhh, dee-lee-cious!



Being hungry does strange things to a person. In this case, 2 of my galfriends were so delirious with hunger that they began making out with one another. Cool!! She's probably gonna kill me for posting this photo up, but too bad...hahaha. It's worth sharing.



After dinner, we headed over to Asian Heritage Row for some drinks. Eager to try out a new watering hole, we eschewed the usual Bar Savanh and Cynna Bar and opted for.... Cafe Senja instead (huh?). Our stomachs were too full for any sort of boogey-ing you see, so Senja it was.







We thought that the place would have some interesting drinks and exotic blends, but in the end the place turned out to be just a fancy mamak stall. The decor and ambience was pretty nice, and could lead you into thinking otherwise, but one look at the menu (Kopi Ais, Milo Ais, Limau Ais) confirms it. Yup, a mamak stall.

Oh well, at least they had these nice little candles decorating the table.










Another Pit-Stop at Luna Bar

On of my Horwath colleagues got a new job at Citibank (yup, he'll be joining the city that never sleeps) and to celebrate, we headed over to Luna Bar for some drinks.



What was initially supposed to be a pretty large gathering turned out to be just a time of chilling with a few of my old colleagues. It was pretty fun though as I haven't had the chance to catch up with one of them for quite some time.

So they arrived in their office attire, straight after work. Seeing them suddenly made me realise, "Oh no! We've become those uncles in office attire at night spots, the very same uncles which we use to laugh at when we were younger".

That realisation hit me like a 1 ton piece of turd.

Noooooo!!!



Here's the soon to be Citibanker with his girlfriend, Carol.



Another working uncle.



And this is Samuel, who has the honour of being one of the first person I know at my age to get married. Bravo bravo! May you be fruitful and multiply!