Adventures By Design

In which the travelers are nostalgic for Japan

Today was our last day in Kuala Lumpur (for now, KL is a major transit hub for Malaysia, and the home base of super cheap airline, Air Asia, so we’ll be back through here at least a couple of times). We decided to head to a area that looked interesting on our map, Bukit Bintang. On our way there we stopped at a cute little Japanese restaurant (furnished entirely with IKEA products) for lunch. We were excited to see that they had a dish called Okonomiyaki on the menu: we had this in Hiroshima when we traveled through Japan and it was so delicious! We ordered one of those and a salmon burger to share, just in case the Okonomiyaki wasn’t up to standard. The food was okay, but not as good as the original in Japan.

After we finished lunch we headed to Bukit Bintang, and found a giant tourist trap. The whole place was full of expensive hotels, and shops selling cheap crappy souvenirs, rather disappointing. However, off the main drag there were several shopping centres frequented mainly by locals, so we ended up in a giant 8 story building entirely devoted to electronics. We checked out a few alternatives to the Eee PC (including one with a touchscreen, cool!), bought a USB memory stick to back-up our blog and photos (RM 50, $17 for 4 Gb), and bought a headphone/microphone thingy that we’ll hopefully use to call our loved ones soon. Oh, and we also bought a Nintendo DSL (like a Gameboy) for Gin, along with a card with 80 games on it that only cost $30. Legal? Probably not.

Our electro-addiction satisfied we decided to walk back to Chinatown for dinner. On the way there we saw a couple of big rats on the side of the street bickering and wrestling with each other. But just when Ric was about to get the camera out for a photo of them, they apparently settled their grievances and they both took off.

After dinner, a greasy Chinese affair, we were surprised to find out that we charged for the small dish of peanuts and moistened tissues to clean our hands, neither of which we had asked for, but both of which were presented as complimentary. A little irritated at being deceived, we headed home to bed. Tomorrow we leave for Melaka, our second stop in Malaysia.