woke up early and went to boon lay to change some malaysian ringgit with my mom before taking a cab down to jurong east to take bus 160 into jb.
my mom refuses to drive in, it’ll be quite useless even if she does anyway since no one knows the way around jb.
the bus ride took only 30 minutes compared to the 45 minutes it took the last time i went there on a weekend.
my mom got stuck at the singapore customs since it was her first time using the bio matrix system, she was having problems with the fingerprint scanner, either pressing her thumb too hard or too lightly. eventually the guy overseeing the gates asked her to enter and did her “check out” manually.
my maid was in the foreign passport row and it took her almost forever to clear it, probably mas salamak’s fault again.
the customs on malaysia side was quite empty, in fact, we took less time to clear malaysia’s custom than singapore’s custom…first time in history!
walked the usual path to city square’s taxi stand and my mom practiced her bargaining skills with 3 different taxi drivers…she gave up eventually and we took the 4th taxi regardless of the price.
the cab driver didn’t know where we wanted to go even thought we showed him the address of the restaurant so i called felix for help, appreciate the help but somehow, his instructions led us to some other ulu place.
i decided to just alight the cab and ask for further help.
thankfully colin was back in singapore and he got one his friends in malaysia to talk to my next taxi driver who finally brought us to the restaurant that we wanted to go.
all the trouble was worth it cause the meal was great!
for those visiting jb and interested in good and cheap food, i strongly recommend teck sing, a chinese restaurant in taman sentosa near the store.
ordered their speciality, paper wrapped chicken (known to most singaporeans as herbal chicken), another of their speciality, fried stewed pork knuckles, a plate of greens and a plate of deer meat fried with spring onions.
the paper wrapped chicken tasted much better than my last visit but the pork knuckle was out of this world, my mum was practically fighting with me over the skin. if she, one that eats healthy food aka brown rice and organic stuffs starts eating something like pork knuckles, you can be sure it’s heavenly!
i’m not sure if the 2 speciality dishes tasted so great that they over powered the other 2 dishes but i really felt the greens and the venison were average or maybe even a little below.
the surprising thing was that between the 3 of us, we drank 12 glasses of water…4 plum juice, 5 barley water and 3 cups of longan drink.
reminds me of my water parades during national service.
and all that for only rm$65.00, cheap cheap cheap!
was trying to get another taxi to holiday plaza when we saw this shop, just a few stores away from tecksing, selling dried cuttlefish and sotong.
the aftermath…
that’s like 1kg each of 3 different kinds of cuttlefish, another 2 kg in a nicer packaging and 1kg of sweet plums.
6 kg of stuffs and we’ve not even stepped into the first shopping center yet.
finally made our way down to holiday plaza and i led them directly to the game shop, finally able to get my hands on the wii.
my mom’s usually the kind who hates games, and of course me playing games, but she seems really interested in getting the wii…and all available accessories.
and so i bought the wii (us version), a pair of extra remotes, the dance pad (my mom wants it, not me i swear!), a pair of silicon casings for my remotes, an original wii power adapter (for us versions to be played in singapore), original wii hd wires (said to be clearer than normal rgb wires for plasma/lcd tvs), a gun attachment and almost 30 games for just rm$1799. this price also includes a free set of spare buttons for my psp.
also helped aaron to get the 8 games he was craving for…
wii + accessories
the games
aaron’s games
left the wii at the shop since it was still early and we didn’t want to bring such heavy load with us while we continued shopping.
went to a nearby dvd shop to get colin’s csi but somehow my mom got excited and…
if you think that’s very little, i can tell you that these are only 1/3 of the dvds she bought.
and if you’re thinking that the guy serving us was happy cause we bought so many things, then you couldn’t be further away from the truth,
my mom bargained for at least 20 minutes before the guy gave in and gave my mom the price she wanted…that’s like 3/4 off the original price.
and that’s not all, we had 3 of those naruto folders you see in the picture.
went to the usual 2nd level shop to get my usual stock of chewing gums,
those lollipop dips you see below the picture are for colin.
my mom, not willing to be outdone started her shopping at the same shop i’m in…
what you see below is probably just 20% of the stuffs she bought.
she bought like a dozen packets of those garlic peas…eeyuck!
we went separate ways from there since my maid wanted to look at clothes she can buy before going back to indonesia next month for her son’s wedding (and i wanted to smoke as well).
was walking around and i ended up buying this.
i’ve no idea why i bought it…probably cause i like the colour a lot.
met up with them again after like 45 minutes (and 3 sticks of cigarette) and since we’ve almost covered the whole place, my mom suggested that i collect my wii and go somewhere else.
just before reaching the game shop, my mom decided to go into this shop selling traditional chinese herbs and somehow, we spent the next hour there.
aftermath?
8 cartons of bird nest (each carton contains 6 small bottles), a 2kg packet of red dates and some other herb that i’ve no idea what it was.
8 fucking cartons of birdnest!
that’s like 48 bottles of birdnest!
49, if you include the free bottle that the owner gave us to try.
our hands were already full of plastic bags and that’s without carrying the wii.
we concluded that we will not be able to carry on shopping elsewhere so i called colin to book the private taxi back to singapore.
paid and collected the wii (an additional 3 large plastic bags) and since it was early, decided to hang around in kfc.
since we will not be eating dinner in jb, i suggested to my mom to packet a few pieces of chicken home for dinner.
while we were queuing up to place our orders, the lady behind us accidentally stepped on my mom’s leg and she pretended nothing happen and continued talking to her friend happily.
we also heard her commenting on her love for “original” instead of the “crispy” chicken.
my mom was somehow quite pissed and when it was her turn, she told the guy she wanted a bucket of chicken…all 20 pieces in original!
wtf!!
i’m not sure if it’s my mom’s luck or just the lady (at the back)’s bad luck but we were informed there were only 18 pieces of original chicken left for the day.
and so we took all the original chicken.
lesson to learn, never to cross my mom!
the private taxi that colin booked for me was the same one we took during our last visit, i’m quite pleased with him since he was friendly and his car is in quite a good condition but i think he injured his right hand or something since he didn’t use it at all throughout the whole journey back, hope he gets well.
a bit of good luck for him to meet my mom since she took his number down and i bet she’ll be calling him to pick her up to go jb very soon.
that’s like $100 for him to just fetch us in & out of jb.
why very soon? read on…
my mom’s auto roaming wasn’t working and throughout the whole day, my granny has been calling my phone time and time again just to check on us, she claims she was worried that we might get robbed or something but my instinct tells me she’s hinting that she wants to come and that we should have called her along.
my mom was probably thinking along the same frequency and told my granny she’ll bring her in next week or something if she’s free
and that, miraculously stopped the phone calls.
- i.am@jacktan.org
