Malaysia Snippets 2 – Eating out, Petaling Street, Good deed and Holiday Crazy Country

These Malaysians love to eat out and when I say eat…they eat non-vegetarian for breakfast, lunch, dinner and if there is any other opportunity to eat in between, then also. One of my friends took me out to this restaurant called Sri Paandis (well if there was a restaurant with this name in Kerala, it would have been at the receiving end of many a joke). I don’t know why Malayalees have this thing about Tams and Paandis in general…anyways the point is something else.

I have eaten nice slurpy meals in many a Tam and Mallu restaurant in India. But never in my dreams would I have ever thought I would see this sight. Imagine a Chinese family, sitting around a table, eating rice, sambar, and of course non-veg from a banana leaf!!! Well that is something I should say. Forget the Chinese, even a Sardar family. I have often seen that in India too, the south Indians prefer eating with their hands and the north Indians like to eat with the spoon. Ok this is a very general statement but even then, most of you would agree with me on this. So that was something.

Last Sunday went to a place called Petaling Street here in KL. This is a place where you would get stuff like clothes, shoes, bags, watches etc. So most of the people frequent this place just before leaving for their home country!!! The government has made this small area into a tourist attraction, so you have proper roof which is at a height of 2-3 floors. And guess what music they were playing when I went there – Dil To Pagal Hai.

There is a mall called Mid-valley close to my place. The designer company that is doing the interiors of my office has their office in the office complex of this mall. So we were in the basement parking about to park our car and saw this young girl walking around really worried. In between getting our vehicle parked in the huge and confusing parking lot, we saw this girl pass us atleast 2-3 times. So we thought we will get involved. The girl had forgotten where she had parked her car. All she remembered was that it was near a door and was in section 12. Ok, so there is not much we can do right. Please search. We go to the office, come back in 15 minutes and see this girl, still looking for her car!!!

Ok so we thought we should get involved. She thought someone had stolen her car. Well girls can be sometimes very clumsy with number. So we checked with her if it was 12 only. Coz if she has forgotten the number, then god only save her. So the car was red in colour, Proton Wira, no it did not have the remote locking system. So we told her that she can get into our car and we will go around the entire parking lot section by section. My friend told me that he has helped a lot of people in finding their way around the parking. Well it didn’t take us a long time to find her car. It was in section 11, near a door and wall, past which is 12. So she must have got past the wall, looked around thinking that it was 12 where she parked and got confused. Well she was so relaxed. She was like I thought the car was really stolen and all…we told her we do this to good looking Chinese girls around Chinese new year for blessings ;)

Have you heard of Thaipusam? Well chances are it is difficult if you are not from Tamil Nadu. And even if you have been in Tamil Nadu, say take my case, I was there for 4 years, and you might still not know what it is. I don’t remember getting a holiday for this particular festival. In Malaysia it is a national holiday. Can you believe that? For a festival of Tamilians for which it is not a holiday for the country or the state in India, it is a holiday for the entire country.