J's happiest moment of learning about our new home in Malaysia was discovering that they celebrate their independence from foreign rule on August 31--her birthday! That means she never has to worry about having to work on her birthday as long as we are here. For this first birthday holiday, we decided to celebrate by watching the Melaka Merdeka (the Bahasa Malaysia term for their independence day) Parade. The hotel breakfast was packed in the morning with a bunch of similarly dressed kids, which we later learned were marching in the parade. We walked towards town and found ourselves a shady alcove that was only inhabited by a couple of young boys. We thought that it was a shop entrance, but learned halfway through the parade that it was the front stoop of someone's home. The boys weren't quite sure what to think of us, but their mother or grandmother didn't seem to mind us--in fact, during the parade she came out with a couple of additional stools for us to sit on, while a man from the alcove next to us handed us a couple of plastic Malaysian flags. I think they were tickled to see a couple of foreigners helping celebrate their independence.

Here's some pictures of the parade. Click on the thumbnails for pithy titles and descriptions.

After the parade, we visited the Stadhuys museum in the old Dutch administrative building and the ruins of the church on the top of the hill, then we had lunch at a Bistro (laksmi curry for J, mushroom soup and appetizer for me). We walked Chinatown again, looking through the antique stores that were open, and J bought herself a locally made clay lamp that she had admired the night before. Here's a picture of the artist at work below.

We rested during the heat of the afternoon, then took a one-hour trishaw ride around the city. The trishaw bicyclist (tricyclist?) was 52-years-old, which surprisingly didn't make us feel bad about him carting us around, although J did exit the cart (she was on the outside) during one uphill run to make it a bit easier for him. His English was okay (obviously better than my Malay) and he was a fine tour guide, although we had stolen a bunch of his thunder by already walking most of his route in the day-and-a-half we had already spent in Melaka. Some pictures of our tour in thumbnail (click for larger, wittier versions).

We had him drop us off at the far end of Jonker's street, as it was still early for our dinner reservations. I spotted a used bookstore and popped in to discover it was filled (and I mean FILLED) with manga...but all in Chinese! We asked for some in Malay, and they were able to scrounge up a few battered copies for me, of which I bought four for RM10 ($3): a Doreamon volume, a Dragonball Z volume, and two that I'm not quite sure what they are.

For dinner, we visited a restaurant just off the canal recommended by the Lonely Planet book called Harper's. We arrived about 45 minutes early and sat at the bar and had a martini for me and a whisky sour for J. As the bartender used ice and water to cool the glasses beforehand, we admired his skill and the time he took with each drink. After the slapdash of most bars in the U.S., it was nice to be in a place where the bartender knew that he should take some time to get it right. The place wasn't full, admittedly, but we learned later that it was short-staffed as some employees had failed to come in (it was a holiday after all, and at wages like this, the temptation just to take the time off is probably much greater) and there wasn't much extra time to be had. He didn't slap the drinks in front of us within five minutes, but it wasn't like we didn't have the time to wait, either. Dinner turned out to be almost as nicely done, as we ordered a series of small plates and a bottle of wine. Well worth the price in both location and food.

Since our ground shipment has still yet to arrive (we've heard rumors that it may have made it to China, but I'm not holding my breath), we decided to take the opportunity to go a couple of hours south of Kuala Lumpur and check out the port town of Melaka, established originally by a renegade prince from Jakarta, then taken over, in turn, by the Dutch, Portuguese, English, and finally part of Malaysia once it obtained its independence 51 years ago.

We left in the late morning on Saturday and it didn't take us very long to get there (Malaysia's road system is quite modern and well-maintained; of course, this comes at a price--in this case, a RM15 toll after exiting the highway). The first thing you drive through is a bit kitschy, but the city itself is quite natural. We checked into the Marriott Renaissance Hotel (a bit of a splurge, actually, although the per night charge for this 4 star hotel was less than we spent at the Holiday Inn Express in Jackson, MS just six weeks ago) and then headed to the old town to check it out and get some lunch.

We stopped to take a photo at one of the remnants left behind from the British, a fountain dedicated to Queen Elizabeth at the end of the 19th century, and then walked in Chinatown checking out the antique shops and trying to find an open place for dinner, using the Lonely Planet guide to direct us somewhere. We eventually found a place, but by that time both of us were very hot. In the future, we must act like natives and quit trying to walk around between 2 and 4 pm.

In the evening, we returned to downtown, stopping at the canal where barges used to bring the trade goods up to the shops for a picture, then on to the Geographer's Cafe for a quick drink before dinner. The drink was not quick (somehow they lost our order), and then we wandered about for a half hour or more trying to find a restaurant that both of us swore we had seen earlier in the day (turns out you can only see the English sign that announces it one way on the street, as we had actually walked by it once and maybe twice). We settled for a couple of panini sandwiches and headed back to the hotel.

by Peter Carey

My favorite novel, Ken Grimwood's Replay begins with the main character dying of a heart attack, then returning to life which forces him to examine what his past life had been and what he should do given this second chance. In Bliss, Harry Joy also dies at the very first page, but when he returns to life, he doesn't dwell on his past but thinks that he has moved on to Hell and all these people posing as his family are but Actors used to torture him. At the end of Replay, you are left with a new respect for life; at the end of Bliss, if you make it that far, you may see life differently, but not necessarily in affirmation.

I hate to think of myself as prudish, but this novel (termed darkly comic) had me squirming uncomfortably in several sections, from the graphic description within the first fifty pages of his wife's adultery and its aftermath to the scene in which Harry Joy's 17-year-old son trades his teen sister some drugs for a blowjob. It was a measure of the quality of Carey's writing itself that I didn't quit after that.

There are resolutions here that help redeem most of these characters, whose ugliness to each other is only leavened by the karmic twist that their author holds in store for them. And the most positive thing about the novel is that it doesn't fail to surprise the reader, never taking the tried and true road but moving in a new direction that remains consistent with how the author has described the characters.

But at the end, I wasn't moved by Joy's plight, or the path by which his life is changed, and in fact wondered if the time I had spent with the book had been worthwhile.

We spent most of Sunday afternoon shopping: visiting car dealers, obtaining an iron and an ironing board, getting lamps for the bedroom, and some grocery items that weren't perishable. At the end of the day, since we were in the city, we took the opportunity to eat out in Damansara Heights at a place that our relocation specialist had recommended to us, the Telawi Street Bistro (known on their menu as simply 'tsb').

We started off with a couple of salads, but the menu item which had entranced us was the pizza option. Specifically, the mushroom pizza. While some vegetables are either hard to obtain here (broccoli, surprisingly, is quite expensive, and comes from Australia) or strange to us (broad beans, also known as bitter beans, which we've used in a couple of stir fry/curries we've made at home), the sheer quality and quantity and relative inexpensiveness of mushrooms here has us wondering just how many things you can cook that have a mushroom ingredient. And, ever since cutting the majority of meat from our diet years ago, we discovered just how good pizza can be when it's not dripping with animal grease and that extended to just how wonderful mushrooms are on pizzas when you can actually taste them.

The "funghi" pizza at tsb had just the right crust--not so thin that you couldn't taste any bread, but not so thick that you felt you were eating bread alone. The mushrooms were very good and the sauce wasn't overpowering, either. But it didn't really have any zing to it, which is likely why the pizza arrived on the table accompanied by every type of tabasco sauce made by the little company from Avery Island.

I was still hungry afterwards, so we actually shared a dessert: lemon tart with raspberries and black pepper ice cream. The pepper wasn't quite strong enough in the ice cream, but the filling in the tart was perfect in its limitation of sweetness to sourness. The combination of good pizza and dessert didn't quite live up to our old hometown favorite (2 Amy's in the Tenleytown area of D.C.), but halfway around the world it was good enough to mark down for a return visit at a later date.

by Nancy Mitford

Having had this book recommended to me from a list of the 100 best comedic novels in the English language, I was somewhat disappointed that the amusement provided herein was of the limited, bring-the-edges-of-one's-mouth-upwards type, rather than laughs that burrow up from the diaphragm. Mitford's novels, which are connected via the narrator and which has characters reappear from one novel in the other, are about English society between the wars and focus on the foibility of the landed gentry (while mentioned in passing, the poor are simply here to be servants, as the focus on the books remains on those with at least 800 pounds per year). It contrasts the Aconleigh household, with its country squire, his all-too-forgiving wife and their passel of children, to that of both the financial classes (in The Pursuit of Love, one of the children chooses to marry a banker's son) and that of the ultra-rich (the Montdores, in Love in a Cold Climate, where the daughter chooses someone equally inappropriate as a life-partner). The narrator, Fanny, is set apart from both families, as her mother is reviled as the "Bolter," a woman who flits from partner to partner, and left her daughter to be raised by her sister and relations.

The humor comes as much from the situations that these girls get into in their pursuit of love as it does from Mitford's writing, which sometimes hides a sharp criticism for both the frivolous nature of these girls who have nothing whatsoever to do with their selves other than society as well as those for whom politics or money is the only thing to live for. If anything, Mitford's compassion translates across all the characters, and it is this that makes the novels something more than full of spite for its subjects. Reading this 50 years removed, the life and times of these families seems as alien to me as any science fiction novel, so my interest didn't wane, although I was never captivated by the books.

We had the good fortune to be invited, along with our other work colleagues who have relocated here with us by now, to have dinner at the home of one of our Malaysian colleagues. It was wonderful to meet his wife and four children, and to have a traditional Malay meal with their family: satay (chicken and beef strips that have been skewered on long sticks, like a kebab, and then slowly grilled, served with peanut sauce and fresh onion and cucumber), mixed fried vegetable salad (lettuce, carrots and other vegetables fried with belachan, which are small dried shrimp, quite an interesting treat!), chicken rendang (coated with spices and cooked for a long time over low heat with coconut milk), a spicy fish dish with large sardine-like fish that had been steamed and then drenched in a nice tomato-ish broth, and a beef dish that I didn't get the name of that was like rendang, except it was thin strips that had been marinated in soy sauce. For dessert we had Boh tea and a tiramisu that some of our colleagues had brought. It was a flavorful and fun evening.

Saturday morning we met some friends of Jill's parents friends, Rich and Louise, (the parent network is like the computer FOAF, just done with memory and lots of email) whom we had had the chance to eat a dinner with when we were just visiting. They are from Houston and also are into horse riding, which thrilled Jill to no end, not to mention that they are real troopers (Louise had unfortunately broke her wrist in a fall from a horse the week before we were to meet them for the first time, but she still came and had dinner with us, propping her cast up on the table!). The place where they ride, the Selangor Turf Club, was having a three-day event this weekend; the dressage competition had been Friday, and show-jumping was Sunday, but I had expressed a preference for the cross-country event which took place this morning. It was interesting to see a small cross-country event, since the last one we had seen was the Rolex, which is one of the top-three events outside of the Olympics. Everyone, horse and rider, has to start somewhere! We were amazed at how the riders could keep the map of the course in their heads, as it didn't seem as well-marked as it could have been, not to mention that it was marked for three different class levels. After the event, we gave Rich and Louise a lift back into KLCC and had lunch with them at Neroteca, a nice Italian bistro/deli, where I had the best caprese panini (tomato, mozzarella, and pesto) and J had a pasta with prawns and pesto. The strawberry italian soda I had was so good (mainly since it hadn't been overly laced with syrup) that I had to have a second. Definitely a place to return to in the future, especially since their deli case had a great selection of cheese available for take out, and cheese is something that the grocery stores seem to have a problem stocking in any variety or quality.

Thank goodness the sore throat has disappeared for now I can eat once again. Not that I mind soup, but a steady diet of it gets very tiring. Since we moved into the house, which is out in the 'burbs and thus not within walking distance of all those fabulous KL restaurants, we've also had to start cooking once again, and it has been nice and comforting to eat pasta or baked potatoes. But you didn't tune in here to hear about domestic tranquility--you want to know more about the restaurants we've been to. My goal is not to disappoint you.....

On Sunday we found the closest restaurant to us that had a high rating on some internet web site (there are many competing ones that attempt to rank restaurants by city; I simply use them for suggestions), Cavallini's at The Palace of the Golden Horses near the Mines Resort. There's actually three restaurants in the the Palace (which is a fancy hotel): a Japanese one that looked promising, a Chinese one that didn't look quite as interesting, and Cavallini's, which focuses on Italian food. Walking into the restaurant, I was surprised at how few tables there were. Mainly the place is a long, thin room next to the hallway that is more of a bar and cigar lounge, with lots of big leather chairs and a big-screen TV. The few tables are next to the windows, and had to be less than 10 of them. We took the one furthest from the TV, having shown up fairly early. The complimentary bruschetta topping was quite tasty, even if the bread was slices of toast rather than an actual fresh-made pane. Both of us had the mozerella caprese salad, which was very good (they peeled the tomatoes for some reason, but that didn't affect the taste). J had the pasta with forest mushrooms and I had the spinach and ricotta rigatoni in a tomato cream sauce. The rigatoni had much more spinach than cheese, which actually improved it over what you receive elsewhere, although I felt the portion was a little small. For wine, J had a glass of Valpolicella while I had the Orvieto. The total was fairly expensive by Malaysian standards, but at least the food lived up to its recommendation.

On Tuesday we had to run into town and pick up some medical records from the hospital, so we elected to stick around and have dinner. Even after hitting the hardware and grocery store for some needed house items, we were too early to the restaurant, A Passage Thru India, as it hadn't opened yet. We walked around the block to waste time and see what else was around and were reminded once again how ill-suited Kuala Lumpur is for walking around. We did discover a Japanese restaurant that looked promising as well as the Malaysian office of Blizzard Games (the makers of World of Warcraft). I mistook the latter for a game store, and had to be informed by the smokers outside that it was instead an office. If this renewable energy business doesn't work out, though, I know where to take my resume now. When we got back to the restaurant the gate was open, although we were definitely the first customers of the evening (it had half-filled by the time we left). Compared to The Bombay Palace, just down Jalan Tun Razak, we didn't think Passage quite lived up to its top spot on Yahoo's restaurant picks, although everything we had was quite edible. I thought the vegetable samosas a bit greasy, although the filling was nice and spicy. We ordered the fish tikka based on the waiter saying it was spicier than the mahi kebab, but spicier and spicy are two different terms. J's paneer in tomato sauce was the best dish, while the garlic naan and mixed vegetable raita were adequate. I'd return, but not for awhile.

Finally, a note about one of those web sites that provide restaurant rankings: TripAdvisor. During our drive from DC to Texas, TripAdvisor had proven very useful in pointing out hotels and restaurants. And, as far as hotels go, it has our favorite, the Traders Hotel, as the number one hotel in KL (the rankings take into account value as well as services). Unfortunately, the restaurant reviews for KL are not only lacking (most of them tend to be one-liners of little value), but the rankings put Chili's (yes, the U.S. chain restaurant) as the number one restaurant in KL. Okay, it's true that we haven't been there, but I find it very hard to believe that Chili's is the best restaurant--or even best value for dining out--in KL. To help TripAdvisor out, I thought I would add some of these comments that I've been writing here and copied in my Ozeki review from a couple of weeks ago into their form and submitted it. I received a rejection for that review today because their policy is "No quoted material from other sources, no material published elsewhere, including other travel review sites." Pfui! The only way TripAdvisor gets exclusive rights to my writing is if they pay for it. So much for their version of Web 2.0.

I started this little project before I got sick, and hope to keep up with it while we are here. Below is an embedded Google Map showing the places that we've eaten so far in Kuala Lumpur, with some small notes and date of last visit added to the descriptions.

View Larger Map

We maxed out our thirty days of temporary housing today, so had to check out of the Traders hotel and actually switch over to our new rental house, which we had the keys too since Friday, August 1, the day I had to be admitted to the hospital. Our original plan had been to actually move in the weekend of 2-3 August, but my illness led us to go ahead and stay in the hotel for our full time period for a number of reasons: close to the hospital, close to food, easy upkeep. But all good things must come to an end, and frankly, staying in a hotel room, even one as nice as the Traders, does pale after a number of days.

Over the weekend, it wasn't such a sure thing. My sore throat had returned with a vengeance on Saturday and I had to go see the ENT specialist again on Monday, who did a blood test and found that my white blood cell count had increased. That, and the pus he believed he could see in the back of my throat, led him to believe that the viral tonsillitis had become bacterial, and he proceeded to throw the works at it: antibiotics, an anti-fungal throat spray, and more gargling.

On Wednesday morning, while still sore, it did seem to be improving, so we went ahead with the plan and checked out of the hotel. I had a morning follow-up appointment with the cardiologist and got some great news: he did a new echo sonogram which showed that all the walls of my heart were moving and the systylic function was back to 60% (it had been at 45% on Aug 1). This is very good, as both the cardiologist and I were expecting to see scar tissue (which shows up as white on a sonogram). Instead, the walls of the heart that had not been moving on 1 Aug (evidence that that part of the muscle wasn't receiving blood) were now moving freely again. The cardiologist thinks that they heart had a "shock" now, rather than a full attack, although the shock could have been the same thing as an attack if I hadn't gone through the thrombylitic treatment. Coupled with the improvement on the throat and I finally feel like I'm improving.

Afterwards, we had to go by a grocery store so that there would be some food in the house, which took longer than we expected. It's always one of my favorite things to go into a grocery store in a foreign country. There's something fascinating and science fictional about picking up a meticulously branded food item and have no clue as to what it actually is. The market, on Jalan Ampang, catered a bit to the expat community, so some things were familiar, although expats in Malaysia tend to come from the U.K. or Australia, so even some of those items were still strange.

That was enough for my strength for the day, so we headed to the house where I took it easy the rest of the afternoon.

For dinner, we popped open a bottle of wine and (barely) managed to make our most common dish, pasta with broccoli and tomatoes. It wasn't quite the same (we had forgotten the salt and pepper, for one thing), but it was sure comforting after the last couple of weeks. And it feels good to finally be in our new home.

Today (well, yesterday, really, but since I was born in Texas, I'm going to go with Texas time for this post) I turn 42, which as most of you know, is the magic number from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Poor Douglas Adams only made it to 49; I'm hoping to see if I can extend that a bit.

Yes, the recent heart attack has definitely got me looking at the life expectancy charts as well as recent obituaries (Bernie Mac at 50?). It's probably a good time for me to re-read Replay by Ken Grimwood (age 59), which is the most life affirming book that I know of--unfortunately, I think I placed it in storage in Maryland. However, equally life-affirming has been all the wonderful notes (comments, emails, facebook messages, etc.) from people who either ran across the "It Had to Happen" post or had it forwarded to them. While the tonsillitis has definitely flared back up, I think it's a different stage--more of the phlegm irritation than actually pustules on the little tonsil nodules I have. I've got an appointment to see the ENT specialist today to see if he can provide any relief (I had a horrible time sleeping the past two nights).

And maybe after this is over (soon now!) I can go back to posting restaurant reviews!