During this trip to KL I've been very happy. Happy that I met up with my two younger brothers and another two sisters. This is what brought me joy and pleasure. With Robert, we had a good bah kut teh breakfast ( stewed pork served with cruellers -yau cha kway )in Klang, (the town famous for its bah kut teh) together with my daughter and sister Ellie, after which he bought us pork chops and acar (Malaysian vegetable salad mixed with peanut sauce and sesame seeds) which we would have as part of our dinner that night. Ellie later gave me some sambal prawn petai ( petai is a nutritious but smelly bean ).
As I posted earlier, my youngest sister, Rosalind (Bee her nickname ) taught me how to make kaya (coconut egg jam). Allen, my youngest brother asked me over to his house for a simple home-cooked dinner of yong tau foo ( vegetables stuffed with fish paste), fried fish and omelette. He had gone to harvest his oil palm and on the way back had bought an ikan tenggiri ( a kind of fish used to make yong tau foo and fish curry) which his maid had used to make the fish paste. His daughter had just returned from Melbourne and so we had cherries for desssert.
Another highlight was having lunch with two classmates, one of whom I have not seen for 50 years, ever since we left school in 1959.As you can imagine, there was lots of catching up to do over a slow buffet lunch.
Yesterday, we went to the Sunway Lagoon Resort which has a large shopping mall, together with my sister Ellie. It is quite far from where we stay and I will never be able to find the way there, if not for my daughter Grace who lives and works in KL.
The Christmas decorations in the Mall were quite pretty but a bit less dressy, compared to the other malls. There were many shops and a couple of main anchor tenants. Browsing around, we made some Christmas purchases and then sat in a Chinese restaurant with a view of the lagoon where lots of adults and children were having fun in the man-made lagoon and water rides. We saw a couple of people abseiling across the lagoon while some were walking along the suspension bridge.
Just watching the people below having their day out in the sun gave me pleasure, as did the pretty Christmas lights and Christmas trees. Listening to the Christmas songs brought back memories of past years when it was really a White Christmas in the UK.
I don't know about you, but I find so much pleasure looking at pretty things in the shops, the decor, the pictures of the food available outside the restaurants, and the crowds of people strolling past or mothers and maids running after their little ones. It is the being in the company of my sister and my daughter, mall crawling that gives me the pleasure, rather than the actual shopping for things although it was nice to try out the clothes and to browse through the accessories as we decide what to buy and for whom. This can be difficult especially when I come from a large family, ten siblings in all.
Later today I will return to the Land below the Wind, to spend Christmas with my elder daughter who has informed me that there is party to attend on Christmas day and on the following day, my grandchildren will be back from Singapore where they had been spending their school holiday with their father who lives and works there.
That is what we have been truly looking forward to, the return of the children. It has been a long time since the piano keys were hammering out scales and melodies and the computer beating out tunes which my granddaughter would sing along with. Ah, such are the pleasures of life.
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