New Beginning

I met up with the Japanese guy in KLCC but before we got to meet there was already trouble.

I told him to wait for me in front of Dome which is located in the Centre Court ground floor adjacent to the park. Apparently he’s not too familiar with KLCC (as I was to find out later, he’s only been in Malaysia for the past four months…)

He thought the “Dome” I meant was the huge dome that was above the centre court, the one which gives a splendid view of the towers from Concourse level. So he was walking around that “dome” and trying to locate me, while I was waiting in front of Dome café trying my best to spot out a Japanese guy amongst the hoard of Malay people (and to think of it, there were tens of thousands of Malays there… all dressed in their punk streetwear and smelling of… ugh… you don’t wanna know)…

It was getting frustrating (mind you, I was carrying my luggage on my back, a tripod and another small bag with my toiletries and digital camera, as well as a bottle of Chivas) so I asked him to wait for me wherever he was and I go find him instead. When I found him, it was apparent how lost he was… he landed all the way in Isetan.

Anyway, we decided to grab Chinese food.

The restaurant was empty and apart from us there was only one other table. Pretty unusual if you ask me, on a New Year’s eve too… the other table had a Korean guy with an oh so yummy face… (hehe I had to add that in). We had trouble ordering food because there were many choices and we both didn’t speak much Chinese. He did understand the Chinese characters though (kanji, in Japanese) but still we couldn’t make up our mind.

We settled for an appetiser which was those seafood rolls with mayonnaise, seaweed soup, a main course of Choy Sum with mushrooms, Ostrich meat cooked with mangoes, and a Patin fish.

He had never heard of Patin. The only fish he knew on the menu was Grouper… again, can’t blame him. So I decided to order the Patin to let him try.

Whoa.. the food was damn good… and the bill also damn good… a whopping RM200

I felt bad because he paid for the meal…
We then decided to go to the park just to see the towers. He hadn’t been to KLCC at night before so I thought it would be good if we went to see it together. However the stupid management had sealed off many entrances. Apparently for the KLCC carnival they wanted to regulate human traffic so they didn’t let people cross over from the shopping complex into the park. We went around in circles and finally decided it wasn’t such a necessity. Besides, there were too many people outside anyway and I was getting nauseous.

He took me back to his place and we had Chivas Regal with Coke to celebrate the New Year. Although he stayed on a very high floor unfortunately his unit did not face the city so we couldn’t see the fireworks. All we got was some lousy footage of the fireworks over in Dataran Merdeka on TV3 and that was it. We had better time drinking ourselves crazy anyway.

It was a long long night. Stayed up and chatted, and had loads of fun. This will certainly be a New Year to remember.

Happy New Year, and may this new year bring about new opportunities, new joy, new people in your lives and new beginnings.

:)