Celebrating Chinese New Year

Xin Nian Kuai Le !!

It is a Chinese New Year seasons greeting in Mandarin. 

Today is the CNY itself, but the feel of it already started about a month ago. The decoration not only at the mall, but also in the streets. Lanterns, Red Color, Clothes called CheongSam and Oranges are everywhere. Last night we already heard the sound of the firecracker, but not too loud. Maybe because not so many Chinese people are staying in the town for the Holiday. This CNY is treated as a big "Hari Raya" in Malaysia. This year CNY the holiday starts from Saturday - Tuesday, even the schools are closing for a week. 

There are some tradition to celebrate CNY, my friend usually cleans the house, so that they can swept away the bad luck and incoming the good luck in the future. There is also the Angpao giving tradition. Angpao is an envelope filled in with some money, given by someone who's already married to someone that's have not married yet. Other than that, there is also the  reading of the fortune of every Shio. 

Well, there is also a tradition for the Chinese people to do at the CNY eve, that is called CNY Dinner. In this dinner, food will be serve in sequence. So, we have to finish the food at the table before another kind of food come. From what I experienced last night, while waiting for the food to come, the restaurant gave us peanuts and Chinese tea. 

Here us, waiting for the food to come. Guess how many of my friends are actually celebrating the Chinese New Year..Only 2 :p the rest of it are the cheerleaders..

The first menu to come is called Yi Sang (sorry for the wrong spelling). After this food served, all the person in the table took their chopstick and together mixed the food. While mixing the food they mention their wish for this coming year.

Appearance of the food before brutally mixed by my friends

The mixing process..

Totally mixed up!! Ready to be eat..

After the first food served, then here they comes along the other food. I am not so sure what they serve, but confirmed everything is Halal at this restaurant. Maybe it is for Chinese Muslim community. 

The food that served on my very first CNY Dinner.. 

Enjoying the different culture in the different country. Last word..Happy CNY friendsss..

KL City Tour

After staying a while in KL, we decided to have a KL City Tour by our own hehe :)

We picked up the place that tourist will visits, so that we also feel as tourists. Started the tourby visiting the famous "Batu Cave" place. What do we do here? My son play with the pigeons and we took pictures as the prove that we've been to this place.

-Chasing the pigeons-

-The Famous Statue-

Batu Cave is located at the Gombak District. Only 13km north from Kuala Lumpur and only around 17km from my house, Damansara. So it was not time consuming at all to come to this place.  

In this place actually there are not so much to do if you are not willing to take the stairs. But if you're that eager to go up, than you can get the Dark Cave Tour. From what I heard, in this tour you will find the bats, muds, and of course experiencing the cave itself. Since we are not prepare for the muddy session and bring along together my son won't be good for us also, so we decided not to go up and take the tour.

Next stop is the Sultan Abdul Samad Building. It is located right in front of the Dataran Merdeka at Jalan Raja Kuala Lumpur. We find this place when we pass through every time we wants to go back from KLCC. The buildings in this area is very nice, old style but looks like been taken care a lot by the government. I don't have a good picture to share it with you, because it is difficult to take picture that time while there are so many car parks in that area. I found the Wikipedia link for this place..Sultan Abdul Samad Building. 

The next stop should be the Ampang Lookout Point, from here we can see KLCC and KL Tower and whole KL itself. But seems like something happened there, that place closed for some reason. Lately I read that the place was shutted down because of illegal operations. They do not submit the proper documentation, and might caused incidents. So, we went down and go back home.

So this is how we made ourself not to feel bored all along the weekend, by act like we are not the residence. :) 

Malacca Visit

This is my belated visit to Malacca, a very short visit one. Malacca is located in the southern region of the Malay

Peninsula, it took about 2 hours driving from Kuala Lumpur. 

Our trip that time was on January 2012, this is my big family short vacation. As I said it was my big family vacation, so it involves my parents, my brothers and my future sister in law. That was a sudden visit, so I was not prepared like usual. Usually I would checked all the best place to visits and have that places on my list. But that time, we only manage 3 hours to go around Malacca City, before dark. 

So there's not much that I can tell, we only visit the Christ Church, Dutch Square, and tried the "Venice of The East" cruising the Malacca River.

the famous Christ Church

= the beauty  dutch square =

Here is the short movie taken from the cruise..Hehe, please don't mind our beautiful faces :p

Culture Shock - Jakarta vs Kuala Lumpur (Feb 2012)

Actually I've wrote this in my previous blog. The comparison that I made is only based on very personal point of view. Only wants to explain how my life after 5 months living in KL.

So here it is :

1. In Jakarta I had 2 maids..yes TWO. So typical Jakarta people who got 1 child and both of the parents are working. But here, I got no one..I do things by myself.. Hehe, Thank God now, after a year passed by, i got a reliable part time maid. For 3 times a week, half a day, we can paid half time maid around RM 400 - 450.
2. I lived in a house before when I was in Jakarta, so I got my very own car park, only in front of my door house. Here, I live in a Condo and the car park is way too far for me :p Way too far refers to, down 6 floor using elevator, walk 100m, and 3 stairs with 10 steps each. Hahaha..
3. Usually in Jakarta after the groceries shopping, I can just park my car and call my 2 maids to pick all the things from the car and put it in the right place. Now, welcome..I need to lift it all up by myself from that far faraway parking lot, and keep all the things to the place by myself. 
4. In Jakarta, me and my husband suffered for two hours driving every single day, on the way to our house to the office, and another two hours to get back home. Here in KL, we decide to choose the very closest condo from my husband's office, only 5 minutes by car..10 minutes if calculating the walking time from our door unit to the car park :p Or around 20-30 minutes walking distance.
5. Since we already saved that 4 hours we usually used in facing traffic jam in Jakarta, now we got a plenty quality family time. We still can do lots of things before or after my husband back from office.
6. In Jakarta, we totally served by people, here, everything seems to be done by machine. Water dispenser machine, autopay parking system, highway touch n go and smart tag reader, and else.
7. Well, driving car in Jakarta, using a horn is very common, here is different..Somebody will only use their horn if they got very disturbed or angry at you. And Malaysian driver..oh my god, they drive like there's no tomorrow..superfast, lack of using the signing light, but they did stop at every intersection, don't care how fast they drive before.
8. Indonesian smile and service that's what I missed the most that time. It's different here, people who actually work to served people like at the department store, groceries store, rarely smile while helping us, or say thanks after we buy something from them. 
9. The mass transportation is much much better than Jakarta. When we haven't bought our car, we usually use the bus, MRT and LRT to go to places..It's just very convenience. But not for the taxi, I prefer to use taxi in Jakarta then here, because here the taxi is owned by the driver, so sometimes they doesn't want to use the meter. 
10. I've been through taking care of some documentation here, such as preparing the name changes for my car.  I can't compare this one with the one that Indonesia have, here it's just way sooo easy, no need to pay for extra fee. 

I'll update in the next posting, if there's any I can found about the culture shock :)