Blog Three -- The morning of August 26th

Good afternoon, blog! I hope you are well. I’m doing pretty swell, blog, thank you for asking. I write this entry from the patio of Olé Café, a happy little coffeeshop on the street Alex aptly named “Restaurant Road” – I think I may try to find out the streets real name after I’m done my iced café late. I have a confession to make, and you may not like it. This is actually the second time I’ve started this blog entry. The first time occurred yesterday afternoon, and went a little something like this:

I start this blog from the third floor of the CitiBank tower in downtown KL. Alex Paterson is cashing a check for RM500 from DiGi, the main mobile provider, and I’m just kinda hanging. Its been a busy two ad a half days – truly a crash course in downtown Malaysian survival.

Oh but so much has happened since then! I was so young ad naïve then. I’m solo MalaysiAndrew now: Alex took off to Korea last night, giving me two and a half days to find myself in KL. So far things are going well. I’m still major (I almost wrote “mondo” there – can you imagine? Ugh) jet lagged. Like I’m holding up okay, but I woke up at 5:30 this morning. However! I’m getting ahead of myself. Where did we last leave off? Ah, yes – the fated “And now… the day begins.” And began the day did.
It was a day of exploration and discovery. After the morning Coffee Bean sesh, Alex took me around to show me the important stuff – i.e. rent, utilities, seven malls and where to get bootlegged DVDs. Rent and utilities are pretty simple and nearby – utilities get paid at the post office in Sangai Wang mall, and rent at a bank nearby. In the process of getting to these, I got to know the malls in the area. Many of them, like Pavillion and Lot10 are crazy western. Inside pavilion you could be anywhere in the world – they have luxury stores like Gucci and Prada, but also chains like Quicksilver, Gap, Starbucks (probably 2 or 3 of them, to be honest) and KFC (people love KFC here, its crazy. Do they have KFC breakfast back at home? Saw an ad for it on the monorail, it kinda made me feel a little dizzy). Basically stuff in the brand-y malls are just about the same price as in Canada. Sangai Wang is a whole other story. I found it to be a labyrith of confusing wonders and creepy manicans.

SG Wang is the Chinese mall and has all sorts of random local trendy shops, laid out in a way that I have yet to understand. The building is just straight up confusing – I went in there today, got lost, and then was spat back out again like 25 minutes later with a 10 dollar pair of brown pants and some juice. When alex took me there for the first time yesterday, he introduced me to a man named Bee. Bee works at a small electronics store (that I may very well never find again) and specializes in hooking people up with bootlegged DVDs. He has promised to take care of my pirated needs. His business goes down in a small office inside the shop. What Alex did for the months he was here was go in, browse his four categorized binders of dvd covers, order whichever movies/tv shows he wanted and then pick them up later on. Each disc costs 8 ringett (so about two dollars and sixty cents). And these high quality dvds too – they come in full box-like cases. In terms of image quality, I understand that it can be so-so, but Alex assured me that Bee is open about when quality is mediocre. After all of the mall/rent business, we journeyed to CIJ.