Alexis and Pasar Karat

On Friday I was invited by Jerm to join him and the rest of his gang at Alexis in Ampang after I invited him to play Left 4 Dead at JS.. my plan didn’t go through as there wasn’t enough people, so I duly went with Jerm instead.

At about 9.40pm Jerm picked me up (after Tomoko), and then went to Puchong to pick up Poh Yuen and Siew. It was probably at about 11pm when we finally arrived at Alexis located at the Great Eastern Mall (paid the security guard-cum-jaga kereta RM1, which was kinda cheap compared to my previous experiences in KL) – the bar with the live performances was rather packed to the brim, and we nearly had to stand all the way at the bar before we finally found ourselves seats.

PY, Jerm, and a moving silhouette of Tomoko.

Sorry for the extremely ugly photos but I’m still learning how to shoot in extreme low-light conditions.. it was probably a bad idea to shoot in Av mode, should’ve went for Manual instead.

Siew aka Glenn hahahaha I thought it was hilarious that he has adopted an English name that was given by his ex-collegemates but now used in his piloting school, and Tomoko.

Only PY, Siew (it feels too weird calling him Glenn now), and me ordered beer drafts while IIRC Tomoko and Jerm had hot chocolate instead. The drinks were exorbitantly priced but that’s to be expected for the kind of place that we went.. my Tiger draft was about RM14.

PY and Siew.

The atmosphere of the bar.

Urban Tribes, a jazz band (whose some members PY knew) played a pretty eclectic selection of jazz – I’m not entirely familiar with jazz but I really enjoyed the songs they played, particularly a number called Spain. It was even more brilliant when they pulled in some musicians from the audience to perform Spain – like a 19 year old but talented guitarist, and a DJ of RedFM lite.fm who sung very well – and when Urban Tribes’ guest singer Evyra (sp?) Elvira sung pretty nonsensically as she didn’t know the lyrics (“tehtarikrotisusu” or something like that, and I didn’t even realise that) and managed to pull off sounding Spanish, that was quite redefining and I thought it was quite awesome.

Siew and Tomoko.

PY.

PY with.. her friend. Can’t remember if it was the drummer of that night or not, but if it was the drummer, he broke her heart that night..

Psychedelic lights with Evyra (sp?) singing at the background.

With my ex-backpacking partner.

We left at about 1am then went to a mamak restaurant in Puchong, before reaching home at nearly 3am.

Thanks a lot Jerm, Tomoko, PY, and Siew for having me there. =) I’ve always wanted to go to a proper bar (live performance optional) with a bunch of friends, so looks like that little hope came true early this year – I really enjoyed myself that night.

---

I had glimpsed a side of KL that I never knew existed – that dark, underlying world of criminals and druggies beneath a city of skyscrapers and twin towers and pre-war buildings. A congregation of questionable characters where we also witnessed good – ironically – in a trade of thievery and stolen goods.

Alvin asked me yesterday evening if I’d like to visit Pasar Karat (as what the locals term it) with him (after being introduced to it from a thread in the Lowyat forum which was swiftly deleted an hour or so after its creation), and I agreed, curious to the idea of an underground market of stolen goods. So at about 5.30am this morning he arrived at my house with his friend Aizyl, and we left for Petaling Street, aided by my GPS.

We parked at the basement of a building (at the rate of RM3 per hour, fucking expensive I know), because anywhere else seemed to be inundated with dark backlanes which looked like a hive for robberies, rapes and murders. We wandered around the streets at 6am in search of our destination, and at that ungodly hour, we were experiencing the KL that we never did before – a city devoid of its usual hustle and bustle, where taxis were seen plying their trade by the dozens, the locals and the occasional foreign tourist with a heavy backpack walking past. At 6am, KL looked completely different, as if between midnight and dawn a veil of cloak draped over the entire city and transformed it to a more darker, sinister place.

When Alvin managed to point us to the right direction (thanks to the great Internet from which he remembered the directions) after we spotted the 4D shops, a small cup of fear set in all three of us – all the exaggeration by Alvin probably caused that as he was quite paranoid about the shady area we were about to go, afraid of the druggies and taikohs and whatnot who were probably the bosses behind the scene.. and afraid to be accosted for no reason too. We were so paranoid that Aizyl left his wallet in the car while I left my handphone in the car too (with the battery taken out as Aizyl told me that people could detect batteries in electronics or something).

But when we were finally at that backlane of Petaling Street, it resembled more of a flea market except that it was dirtier and smellier and incredibly narrow that it could hardly allow a crowd of people to walk past.

Pic taken from KLGuy of PhotoMalaysia for illustration purposes. I wouldn’t dare take my camera to that shady an area.. although I did bring my compact camera and didn’t use it lol.

A myriad of things were on sale on makeshift tables and bamboo mats, some bordering on the ridiculous: shirts, underwear in boxes, pots and pans, bottles of shampoo, boxes of cigarettes (a large box of Marlboro cost only RM2), sports shoes, high heels, SPM revision books that looked so old as if it was from the 1990s, very old magazines like FHM and Men’s Health, blades, old printers, old film cameras, a new-looking Microsoft keyboard, CPUs, an old stereo set, photo albums, memory cards, handphones, phone casings, toys, watches, dozens of Ridsect, toothpastes..

Aizyl spotted an old Chinese auntie squatting down who looked quite miserable.. and he was saying that she looked depressed probably because she was selling Astro magazines HAHAHAHA!! Something that no one in their right mind would buy for crying out loud. What was probably the lowest of the low (if the items were indeed stolen) was someone selling an old wedding photograph (complete with the photo frame) of someone – I can recognise the oldness of the photo by the hairstyles of the couple and the extremely ugly retro specs the woman was wearing.

We walked around purveying through the wares, but what interest us the most were the handphones that were on sale that were obviously stolen. N95 was sold at RM530 while N96 was priced at only RM570 (wtf?? obviously people would go for N96 right if it was only RM40 difference.. those were the purported ‘best price’ that was given to us, but we bet we could haggle for even lower prices if we wanted to, as the aforementioned Lowyat forum’s topic creator purchased the N95 for about RM150 or RM200.. believe it or not). Oh and the iPhones were going for about RM1200 (the first price we were quoted for, and “boleh kurang lagi” as the stall keepers were saying), which seemed ridiculous if compared to the prices set for N95 and N96 – there were also other phones that were on sale but they were on the lower end. I was even more incredulous to hear that we would be given a 6-month warranty (we had to go to Pudu.. or some other shady places), on top of the full set of accessories that normally come with a spanking new phone.

As tempting as all these prices were, we all had our set of principles.. we were pretty clear that when we were there, we wouldn’t purchase a thing but merely be a trio of observers, and we indeed did not sway. We thought it would be morally wrong (although morals are pretty ambiguous) to directly support the trade of thievery where countless of victims were relieved of their goods they purchased with their hard-earned money, and when spilled blood was a possible occurrence in the midst of robbing others. When I saw the handbags that were on sale, I wondered how many women were victims of snatch thieves and probably were traumatised, injured, or killed as a result.

There were plenty of poor people patronising Pasar Karat, and I couldn’t help but think if this could be a watered down version of Robin Hood stealing from the rich, but in this twisted version, he sells the wares for rock-bottom prices to the poor. The poor wouldn’t give two hoots how the wares were obtained from as long as they could live and survive from their purchases.. and frankly, without knowing how things are behind the scenes, it’s hard for me to give unbiased comments, so I’ll stick to being neutral to the existence of this market, supposedly way back from 1987 or even earlier.

To some of the traders’ benefit, there were actual legitimate sellers although it’s hard to determine who is legit and who is not (the ones who sell the handphones are definitely not..).

When we were at a handphone stall, Aizyl noticed an incident whereby a woman who looked a little dazed (a druggie maybe?) picked up a used stub of a cigarette from the floor and asked the stall-keeper for a lighter. The stall-keeper took the stub out of her hands and threw it away, and then she began to walk away.. not before he called her back and produced a brand new cigarette from his own stash and lighted it for her. What Aizyl saw was quite thought-provoking, that despite the illegal and questionable nature of the entire market, he also saw a sliver of good in the people involved in that trade.

Once we were satisfied with our little adventure down the organised trade of Thieves’ Market, we ate breakfast at Petaling Street – the famous porridge stall which seemed to be a little pricey. When the foreign worker who served us asked if I wanted my fish porridge to be ‘sang’ or not as they serve it in two types (to which I’ve no clue what it meant), I just nodded yes and when my porridge was served to me later, I was also given a plate of raw fish.. -___- but I just placed it in my hot porridge anyway and surprisingly it was hot enough to actually ‘cook’ the fish.

We reached home at a little after 8am.