Denny's Vacation Part 3 - Kuala Lumpur

After a boring Wednesday spent watching Mad About You and doing other random best friendy type things, we left the apartment early on Thursday morning to head to KL. Our decision to bring forward the KL trip was mainly due to Kewei & Najip, Irene & Shawn not being able to join us in KL over the weekend. It wouldn't have made sense if we went ahead to KL on the weekend instead of spending time with them in Singapore.

Therefore, Thursday morning found a blurry eyed Denny and me headed on the MRt towards HarbourFront. Morning hour peak commuting was quite an experience for Denny. We were meant to get there by 8:45 am as our coach was scheduled to leave at 9:15 am. However, due to our failure in locating the Aeroline Express counter, we were hopelessly late for the check in. On top of that, when we got there, the girl at the counter was hopelessly unhelpful. When I could not remember the booking number for the life of me, she made a fuss and glared at me a few times before letting me log into the customer booking website on her terminal. Nevertheless, we finally got our tickets and made it to the coach boarding bay where we discover that the coach was delayed... So much for rushing!!!

The ride to KL was pretty boring. Fortunately the seats were pretty comfortable and given that I hadn't had much sleep the night before, I slept almost the entire ride to KL while Denny played some Puzzle Quest on his PS3 and watched Transfomers on the coach TV. We travelled via the Tuas 2nd link, arriving in KL sometime before lunch and proceeded to hunt for our hotel. This became an adventure on its own.

In the first place, after we had gotten off the coach at Corus hotel, we had to look for our own hotel, the Crowne Princess KL. Unfortunately, no one seemed to know where it was. The conceirge at Corus told us to head towards the Petronas Twin Towers, the conceirge at the Petronas Twin Towers told us to head towards the Corus Hotel. At this point, we decided to stop for lunch before heading to the hotel. I was fairly excited when I discovered there was a Nando's there and we proceeded to have Nando's for lunch. It's been a while since I had Nandos and it was every bit as good as I remembered it to be. When we were done, we headed back outside to hunt for our hotel. We stopped several people to ask for directions while heading back towards the direction of Corus hotel. Still not being able to locate the elusive Crowne Princess, we stopped a policeman who told us to head back towards the Petronas Twin Towers and go past it. At this point, we gave up walking in the humid Malaysian heat and hopped onto a cab. However, even the cab driver didn't know where the Crowne Princess was and instead drove us to the Crown Prince Hotel. After showing the cab driver the address and he made a few calls, he finally managed to deliver us to the hotel which we discovered was some ways behind the Corus Hotel. It wasn't exactly far, but we had been misdirected a few times. After checking in (which took an extremely long time as well as we had to get the hotel voucher printed but couldn't do so as the business centre had only 1 printer which was being utilised) we took a short break before heading out once again.

Denny before digging into his first ever Nando's meal.

Mmmmmmm my very own Super Hot peri peri Nando's meal!

We spent the earlier part of the afternoon exploring KLCC and laughing about how the huge mall had all these expensive boutiques but no one seemed to be buying anything. As far as we could tell, no one carried any shopping bags and everyone was just window shopping like us. A few hours into window shopping, we got bored of it and decided to explore KL somemore. We ventured out into the heat once again and began our attempt to reach the KL tower. This proved to be a mistake. We walked and walked and walked. While the KL Tower looked like it was getting nearer, we never seemed to arrive. We were both sweating like pigs and quite close to giving up when we mounted a long winding road upslope and finally found what we thought was the entrance of it. Unfortunately, we were wrong. We had to go downhill once again and enter the KL Tower compound from another gate. At least we didn't have to walk uphill to the KL Tower and instead took their mini bus which deposited us on its doorstep. We ascended the KL Tower and spent the next hour or so enjoying the sunset and finding out lots about KL through their recorded guide tour. We kept trying to get a decent photo of the twin towers after the sun had set and it was lighted up, but found it extremely difficult. Instead, we settled for some fun shots of the KL Tower from the bottom of it.

Me trying to figure out where on earth the KL Tower was

Beautiful sunset captured from the KL Tower

One of my fav photos of me and D

Terrible attempt on my part to capture D with the Petronas Twin Towers in the background

I settled for an "arty" type shot of D pushing over the KL Tower

Almost lay on the floor to get this picture

Since we had exhuasted ourselves walking to the KL Tower, we ended up hoping in a cab back to the hotel and resting before heading out for dinner. Since we wanted to try some local foods, we started researching on the internet. As it was quite late at that time, we decided not to go somewhere too far away and settled for an english deli/pub that was recommended in the entertainment magazine and which seemed to be fairly near to our hotel. What a mistake that turned out to be! The map was extremely misleading and instead of a 10 mins walk it turned out to be almost 30 mins away! We walked and walked and were really close to giving up before we finally found the place. By that time, we were tired, hungry and just keen to sit down and get a drink. Fortunately, the deli was a fairly nice place and wasn't crowded at all. Other than ourselves, there was only another table of expats who were discussing the Asia Pacific economy. We ordered some sausages, steak, mushrooms and bacon which turned out to be a bit disappointing. Although the starters, portobello mushrooms with cheese and a bowl of sun dried tomatoes, were pretty good, the other items were only mediocre. The steak was woefully tough, the bacon over cooked and the sausages nothing special. On top of that, the meal was kind of expensive. Ah well, now we know better than to trust entertainment magazines that are planted in the hotel

Dinner at Jarrod & Rawlins

In front of their extensive wine cellar

The next morning, we slept in a little before packing up and heading to the KLCC in hopes to ascend to the skybridge and fulfil Denny's dream of imagining Catherine Zeta Jones in her "Entrapment" costume climbing alongside him. His dream was dashed when we arrived there and discovered that all the tickets for that day had been given out and we couldn't go visit the sky bridge after all. Denny had to make do with longing for that dream from afar instead.

Since we weren't heading back to Singapore until 2:30 pm, we looked around and settled down for lunch instead. I picked a Sundanese restaurant so I could introduce Denny to some Indonesian styled food. We had some sayur asam, satay, nasi kuning, rendang and tahu. Denny finished the meal with some great mango dessert. We walked around KLCC somemore before heading back to the Corus Hotel to board the coach back to Singapore.

The coach ride back to Singapore was not as comfortable as the coach ride to KL. In the first place, this coach was an older model and the seat didn't recline as well as the other. The coach itself was late and there was some minor traffic on the way back as there was an accident on the highway. Denny and I idled the time away playing Puzzle Quest, randomly chatting, watching Transformers and watching Big Momma 2. Eventually, it started pouring really heavily and the coach started going even slower. In addition, we had to make a poop stop as one of the passengers needed to use the restroom real bad. So instead of arriving back at HarbourFront at 7:30 pm and meet Irene for dinner, it was fairly obvious we were going to be late. Unfortunately, when we finally got to the Singapore checkpoint, we discovered that Denny's phone battery had gone flat, so we couldn't call inform anyone about how late we were going to be. The good thing was we had already decided where we were going to meet for dinner and I figured they would be smart enough to just order when they realised we were late.

We finally got back to Singapore at around 8:30 pm and proceeded to White Dog Cafe at Vivocity for dinner. We found both Irenes there with Ben and Kelvin in tow. They had already ordered without us, but that was fine as we weren't really hungry anyway. We sat down, had some food and discussed about bringing Denny to Hooters later as he had never been to a single Hooters. However, we ended up being too tired after dinner and headed home to crash instead.

Better view of the Petronas Twin Towers with the KL Tower in the background

 
My favourite picture of D, enjoying his mango dessert

Before we board the coach back to Singapore

Kelvin petting the dog at White Dog Cafe

Kelvin happily posing for a picture with me, even though he still refused to go near Denny