Exhausting weekends

Been out on the weekends for an incredulous amount of time. Here’s the final ultra-long post before I depart for Langkawi, the 99 Islands of Magical Adventure as claimed by advertisements.

Saturday – 7th January 2006
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Where to start.

On Friday midnight when I went online, we had an instant discussion on where to go the next day – the we being me, Kai Shen, Daniel and Andy. It was pretty last minute considering that we were discussing it from about 11pm till 2am, with the most part of it being nonsensical topics. Tsk, last minute Malaysian culture.

Kai Shen and Dan came to my house at about 9.40am-ish. Went to pick up Andy at 10am sharp but he needed 10 minutes to get ready ‘cause he just woke up or sommat, despite me phoning him much more earlier.

We had our breakfast at one of the Chinese restaurants in Taipan where I ordered mee suah. Then we went our merry way to Carrefour, parked my car at the basement, hop on the train to KL Sentral, switched train to go to Sungei Wang.

Reached there about 12pm, and after walking for a bit we splitted up for a while. It so happened that there’s a group of DS players from the lowyat forum meeting up at that same day at the same mall, so I went to the direction of Marche at 3rd floor.

Thought it’d be just a normal restaurant, but it was sooo fucking huge. I’ve never been to a Marche before (heard Jess talking about it on New Year’s Eve when she went to Singapore), so their concept and all..was different, I suppose.

I stood at the entrance wondering if the meetup was cancelled after all since it looked fairly empty, because of its extremely large size. A female staff member kindly gestured me to go in, gave me a piece of paper and told me I can make me decision inside. If I didn’t want to eat anything after all, I merely have to return the paper (in which, it was written, if lost a fine of RM100 will have to be imposed).

After wandering around for several seconds, ignoring the offers of the various stalls inside the restaurant, I headed straight to the smoking area where a group of guys with heads bent towards their lean, mean DS machine.

I’ll have you know that with strangers, I can be painfully shy.

And a little background info. I have been chatting online with one of the lowyat forumers who helped me with my decision to purchase a DS, who goes by the name of “sihumchai” in the forum. Real name’s Greg.

Only one person was standing at that time in his Hawaiian shirt, so I went ahead and shook his hand. “Hi I’m Saigo.”

I’m a little unused to introducing myself using online nicknames (I went to a forum gathering too 2 years back using another alias, an ‘underground’ secret Malaysian board of GameFAQs.com), but being known as Saigo at the meeting sounded cool I suppose.

Knowing that I wouldn’t be there long since it wouldn’t be nice to split up with my other three friends, I told Greg I’d be staying for only 30 minutes in which he announced to the rest of the DS players, who were all known as their online nicknames with the exception of sihumchai.

From left to right : Mr Ez(bottom), sihumchai(top), evoHahn (MU shirt), Carsonoel (white shirt, face cannot see), marauderz (boxed shirt) and me.

So we started playing Mario Kart DS. Here’s the nifty part about the DS - depending on which games you have, most of them (like Mario Kart) allow multiplayer function wirelessly using only a single game card. So if the rest of the players (like me) don’t have the game, they can merely use the Download Play function to download a small part of the game to their DS, and play multiplayer!

I raced against 7 other players and lost miserably due to my inexperience with the game. We also played Bomberman and it was really fun. Was the champion for several rounds too ^_^

What amazes me is the fact that a group of strangers with common interests can gather round and chat with each other amiably. We call each other by our online personas, laugh heartily over silly things that erupt while playing.. pretty fun. Even the management of the restaurant encouraged us to do the meetup more often (maybe because they could rake in cash that way, but then again I didn’t order anything since I was gonna stay for a short while only).

Would have stayed till the meeting was over but I don’t dump my friends that easily. >_> I also left right when a jug of beer arrived. The two Malay dudes who were there were rather tolerant of the drinking ones, and vice-versa. Being in the smoking area meant being exposed to smoke by sihumchai and one or two others, but it wasn’t so noticeable.

Yeah, the supposedly 2nd DS meeting was rather sweet.

Since I was the only one brought a camera… snapped some pics but they were rather blurrish. =___=

From left to right : kyap (closest to camera), sihumchai (standing), Mr Ez (V hand pose), evoHahn (MU shirt), Carsonoel(white shirt), Marauderz, me, mudmaniac friend, and ashchia.

Concentrating hard on Bomberman, multiplaying with 8 people in total (there were about 11 there).

Funnn. Even a working man of about 30-40 years old was there too - mudmaniac friend. I was the youngest I suppose.

Re-joined Andy and the rest at about 1.30pm and after walking around for a bit, we walked towards Berjaya Times Square. Went to GSC and bought only 3 tickets for the movie Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit as Kai Shen had to go off earlier for church.

When KS finally did, we walked around aimlessly while waiting for the movie to commence at about 4.40pm. We even stopped by at Starbucks and sat there without ordering for an hour while discussing plans of Langkawi >_>

Us sitting at Starbucks near GSC cinemas.

The movie was alright. It started off with an animation of the Madagascar Penguins which was really funny, and good. When the claymation of Wallace and Gromit came on, I didn’t expect all of the characters would sport a British accent. Which means that some of the subtle English jokes won’t be understood by a certain minority of the people.

The movie didn’t try hard to be funny, and I’m sure the audience would love it all the same. Hilarious to a certain extent but that’s about it. I’d probably rate it a 3.5/5.

I realised that whatever I’m typing right now might sound uninteresting and dull, but I’m pretty exhausted after going out two days in a row for more than 12 hours. I was out for about 14 hours on Saturday.

We left Kuala Lumpur by train at about 7pm after there was nothing left to do. We went to Pyramid and found a good spot of parking outside it so we didn’t have to pay the RM3 parking fees that go with it.

Went straight for Factory Outlet Store (FOS) since we already knew what we wanted. The FOS branch in Sungei Wang didn’t have the beach pants we wanted, and said branch was much smaller than the one in Pyramid anyway.

Did a spot of trying on with the pants at the fitting room multiple times that we can be very well be labelled as the stereotypical girls who take ages to shop.

It was almost RM150 for the three of us combined, but we got some free yellow FOS bottle. Heh.

Went back to Subang at about 9.30pm, picked up Kai Shen, and went to Wai Hong’s house because he just came back from Japan.

Pretty much there were lots of stories to tell, and items and articles from the land of the rising sun. The lucky bastard got a PSP and 1GB memory for free, courtesy of the Lions Club over there. His RM300 Gundam model, 1/60 scale, was free too, from one of his host families.

Went to makan at MajuMaju nearby since the rest of us excluding Kai Shen and Wai Hong hadn’t taken our dinner yet. Went back to Wai Hong’s house again, hung around for a while and finally went back at nearly 1am.

Crazy night.

Sunday – 8th January 2006
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Woke up late earlier today, but thanks to a call from Suet Li (who also came back from South Africa yesterday morning) who wanted to join us for the education fair, I managed to wake up 40 minutes before the designated leaving time - 10am.

Went around picking up Wai Hong, Suet, Andy and Kai Tzin before we go to Kelana Jaya’s LRT station. The other batch of group - Jess, Adrian, Esther, Heng - went separately to the KTM station instead since all of ‘em couldn’t possibly fit into my car.

Inconsiderate young people these days sitting at seats designated for the old, disabled, and the pregnant. Disclaimer: The train was slightly empty, so we took the seats that were empty without seeing any signs. The old, disabled, and the pregnant were not in sight. That was also Kai Tzin, me and Suet in the silhouette.

Wai Hong and Andy posing.

Killer poselah. Even the old man sitting next to Wai Hong was watching.

Andy was wearing Suet’s sunglasses, pointing to something I don’t know.

We also gave up our seats to a foreign couple (love the blond hair and blue eyes baby) with two very young daughters and son. Pn Yee must be so proud.

After travelling through 14 stops did we finally reach KLCC. We met up, had our lunch at the food court (both Wai Hong and I took away McD’s instead) then went to the Star Education Fair.

Some fcukers posing.

It was crowded like hell, huge, and filled with booths from every single institute imaginable. Suffice to say after travelling from booth to booth, stopping by at some to ask some questions, I didn’t really gain much. In fact, was so exhausted since I didn’t rest enough after yesterday’s very long excursion, that I lost all mood to continue walking around in the large convention centre.

We even went to a Business talk organised by limkokwing University but we discovered we were too late since about three minutes later, the talk ended. Heh.

Some long, narrow alley connected to various other meeting rooms at the 3rd floor of the Convention Centre.

The two jagungs, upclose. Previously seen from far on the first day of the year at roughly 2.30am.

After all that jazz at the Edu fair, we hung around at the park for a while and discovered only later that Esther lost her handphone due to her carelessness. >_> So the whole lot of us split up again, and it ended up with only WH, Andy and Adrian following my car back.

Long story short, I fetched Adrian back to his house. On the way…

Evidences of the Ugly Malaysian Drivers:

This Lynx driver, bearing the number plate LA 147, wanted to cut the line when the traffic light turned from green to red. So he was stuck. And basically obstructing the other cars from the other lane.

When the light turned green.. yay obstruction! We were planning to submit this picture (or the previous one) to TheStar for all Malaysians to see, at their Thumbnails section. WH suggested that once it’s posted and it wins us RM50, we should only report it to the police. :)

While waiting for the rest to come back from Carrefour and the police station (to report the missing cellphone to retain the same prepaid number), we went to Tanjung for a drink while Andy hogged WH’s PSP and I hogged my DS. Sophisticated youngsters these days and their array of gadgets. >_>

Then went to Shawn’s house to have some chit-chat while we purposely gloated WH’s newly-gained possession, the PSP, knowing how Shawn salivates over it. The fact that he got it for free, merely adds fire to envy. Rofl.

Went to Pizza Uno, Taipan at about 7.45pm where the rest were. Sat there, ordered drinks and scrumptious Italian food. Also drank half of a glass of the “Sangaea”, mixed fruit juices mixed with red wine and brandy. It was darned good, but darned expensive as well at RM30 per jug (we are students after all).

Oh, Sarah joined us too.

Was tired like hell (reason explained in one of the lines in the wall of text above), so I didn’t have the mood to participate in the others’ conversation. Apparently Sarah realised that WH, Andy and I were quiet, even more magnified so after some tales of some college students’ sexcapades were told and we remained completely silent.

Yep, am tired. Went back at about 10.20pm fetching Kai Tzin back to his house first, and brought Heng and Andy to Wai Hong’s place where supposedly Shawn and RB were waiting (RB came back from NS for a short break).

It was then WH’s mum told us that they went back after waiting for us for half an hour. Heh. So we stayed for a while till 11pm, and left.

Yep, so I spent 14 hours out on Saturday, and 13 hours out today. Bloody hell.

Also received an e-mail from my Editor of CUE Mag yesterday, where I was given an optional assignment (deadline on the 13th January, which he acknowledged wasn’t a lot of time - especially since I’m leaving for Langkawi from the 10th – 13th) on Nicol David which I took on since the money is important. >_>

This part made my day, referring to my Skydiving article I submitted.

Have gone through your article, its good stuff! I like the informative tone you used for the section, suit it very well. Keep it up!

Might not mean much to you guys, but for a newbie freelancer new to the field, it means a lot. :D