It was about 10pm in the night. The sky was dark and the city was given the visibilities by the street light, neon light, billboards light and the lights from passing by vehicles. On our way back to the hotel from Bukit Bintang Monorail station, we saw a crowd of people on the wide footpath beside the street looking at something. It was at the junction of Jalan Bukit Bintang to Lot 10 and Sungei Wang.

When we moved nearer, we saw two people blowing a large long wooden / bamboo pipe musical instrument. We were curious why they were blowing to a piece of stone. They caught our attention and kept us to continue watching their performance.  After a while then, we moved our sight to the other performers, each of them played different types of musical instrument.

I used slow shutter speed to take this picture, and the movements of the drummer’s hands were exactly recorded in the photo. He moved his hand to hit the drum really fast.

I wonder why my camera has made the night became the day. If the photos are not in a warmer colour tone, I would not be able to tell that it was taken in the night. I have no choice that I need to switch to the highest ISO setting on my camera and the largest aperture to enable me to take these photos. The shutter speeds required were still very tough and challenging. Out of 10 photos, 3 of them were shaken and blurred and all of them are noisy got noises.

What? How can a picture be noisy? Yes, there are two types of noise from the picture. First, it means the dots on picture which was created digitally because of low light which reduced the quality of the photos. Second, although the photos do not produce sound, but have you heard of “a picture is worth a thousand words“. :p From these pictures, I can imagine the sound of different musical instrument.

This wooden musical instrument produced sound like a frog. I have seen a different version but similar things that produce the frog sound. I will show you in the future.

This musical instrument carried by this young lady was quite common right? What does it called? Can you tell me?

The drummer put the drum between their legs.

We were not sure when it the last route for Monorail and Putra LRT, we need to take 2 trains to go back to our hotel. Therefore we did not wait until they have finished their performance, and we proceeded to the monorail station. I have missed the opportunities to learn where they come from, what the musical instruments are called, and other questions which were still in my mind. If you know about the answer, please tell me.

The other reasons we left were because my camera has ran out of power and the memory card was full , and I wished to go back to the hotel to clear the memory card. I have learned some lessons again, I will bring extra set of battery and I am considering buying another memory card.

Actually we watched the performance for about 5 minutes only. In between, they had taken a short break and some people put some money into their container.

They made me think of the bush dance in Australia that I miss a lot. I wish I can watch these types of performance again.

I stepped my foot on KL’s land for the first time in 1998, and from my first experience, when I saw the tall building (especially KL tower and KLCC twin tower), even if I felt that it is quite near, I would never believe it again that it is near to the place I am standing and looking at it.  I still remember the first time I came with my friend, we walked and walked but we can never find the entrance to them although we felt that we were just underneath the tall building.  The reason is the building is too tall and too big, and it made us felt that it is near but actually not.

I still remember in 1998 trip to KL, we finally lost our way after a long walk, we gave up and took a taxi for just a short distance (less than 3 minutes) but it cost us RM10.  And the taxi driver had cheated us that the KLCC suria have not been closed at that time, but when we reached there most of the shops had been closed.  It was 11pm.

It is behind another building, but we were not sure which junction to turn in to reach there.

It was exactly 10 years ago, and I came here again in 2004 and 2005 for a short KL trip, but I learned as much as possible how not to be cheated by unmetered taxi, and try to use train or go on foot.

We are not familiar with the KL train system, but we challenge ourselves to travel from our hotel at Petaling Street to KL Tower and Suria, KLCC.  We were exploring and discovering new things as we moved towards our destination.  Of course, we did make some mistake when taking the train, because the train always has two tracks, but we have learned how to go to the other side when we headed the wrong way.

Yesterday, our destination was KL tower then KLCC.  First, from our hotel we walked through the China Town (a.k.a. Petaling Street a.k.a. Chi Cheong Gai), and reach this iron tunnel to the LRT station.

There is no direct train to KL tower and the ticket seller told us that we need to transit at Masjid Jamek station and take other train.

Since we want to get the transit map for train which I had forgotten to print out from my computer and we want to have a look of the KL Sentral and take some photo, we went the East instead of going to the KL tower direction on the North.  From there, we got the transit map at the information counter, and we were told to take monorail to Bukit Nanas station to KL tower.  Next time, we don’t have to go through KL sentral, we only need to transit at the Hang Tuah Station.

An extra thing that we have learned is we found new inter-state train service from KL to Ipoh and vise versa.  We now have a new option instead of taking bus to Ipoh.  It is called KTM AntaraBandar.  There is a special promotion for this month, RM1 only for the earliest and last train of the day in December.

From KL Sentral to the nearest Monorail Station, we need to walk through a path, and cross a road.  Half way we saw a special music instrument player earning his life.  I don’t know what is that musical instrument called but the music is special and I like it.

We bought the ticket and finally we reached the Bukit Nanas Monorail station.  We have gone through many auto ticket collecting / checking machine, and I found it interesting.  I noticed that I have to take the ticket out first before I push the passing bar, otherwise it won’t allow me to get through.

We saw this notice that tells us how to go to KLCC by transit at Dang Wangi Station, and we thought we may come back this place again, and follow the instruction after we visited KL Tower, but it was not the case.  It is not necessary to take a train from KL Tower to KLCC.

When we got out from the Bukit Nanas Monorail station and went down the staircase, we followed the road sign, and we asked a few details at the tourist information booth, we finally reached KL Tower (the 4th tallest tower in the world).  I will tell you the detail in the coming post.

Then, after spending our time on top of the building and walking around, we headed towards Suria, KLCC.  First, we thought that we need to take another train to KLCC, but we found that it is not that far away.  But to confirm that, I have asked the helpful tourist information booth staff again, which method is faster and economical.  She said that there is no need to take the train, because walking to the LRT (Dang Wangi Station) is further then walking directly to KLCC.  And we walked cross the road and directly went through Jalan P. Ramlee and finally we reached Suria, KLCC.

From here and from the transit map, we learned that Bukit Nanas Monorail Station and Dang Wangi LRT Station is transitable, but we are not sure about their distance, we will find it out next time.

The first thing we did at KLCC yesterday was having our late lunch, then paid a visit to the PC fair, then I have bought a 2X2, 3X3, 4X4 and 5X5 Rubik’s cube.

Since I seldom come to KL, we have found many things through exploring.  I will tell you more in the next posts.  We need to check out from our hotel later and we will take a bus to Ipoh.  May be in the next few days, SiewPeng and I will come to KL again using the inter-state train at RM 1.  :p  We are still planning for it… … 

Finally it comes to the end of year again, and here started our year end trip to West Malaysia again.  Previously we have been quite busy and now it’s a good time to recharge our battery by going somewhere we have never been before.

We are now in Kuala Lumpur, where I am going to visit the PC fair at Kuala Lumpur Convention Center (KLCC) later.  We have been … … and will be exploring … …

We will resume blogging and maintain posting frequency from today.

It was a sunny afternoon and we have got some errands to run. We were about to go out when we spotted him taking a nap on top of the car roof again. He seemed to be very sound asleep because he wasn’t disturbed at all when we took his napping pictures.

Oh well…not until a few clicks and whispering among ourselves, we woke him up. He wasn’t really surprised but he looked around like how we would try to find the alarm clock in the morning and shut it down. He mewed. If I were to compare, his voice could be as loud as Mr. Yellow.

He didn’t move. He began with a small yawn with a bit of muscle stretch and he mewed again.

And then…a huge yawn We nearly missed this shot.

I think he was trying to pass the message that he wanted more naps. Look at Mr. Yellow. Who do you think has a larger jaw?

Well, he didn’t get to continue his nap on the car eventually because we needed to use the car. He jumped down and nap on the ground instead.