After the way our shopping trip to Jakarta ended, I'm pretty sure I said "Never again!", yet somehow Peggy managed to get me back on a plane just a month or two later. This time we headed to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia with our friends Jodi and AnnMarie. We'd been told that KL was much the way Singapore had been about 20 years ago, before they started tearing down all the good stuff and replacing it with skyscrapers, and that everything there was much cheaper than in Singapore. I can only assume that I must have felt the need to purchase more Christmas and birthday gifts for all my friends and family members, before we headed to the states on home leave.
The big draw here was the Royal Selangor Pewter factory. John had gifted me with a beautiful tea set from there for Christmas, which he had purchased in Singapore, but we'd been told you could get much better prices by going straight to the factory (no, the added expense of plane flights and hotel rooms does not count). Judging by the number of Selangor bags surrounding us, I guess we found that to be true.
As with so much these days, my memories of that trip are rather hazy. I remember two minor tiffs during the trip. One was when we went to a Cold Storage shop (a mini-mart) a few blocks from our hotel one evening, after having dined at a fun Texas-style restaurant that served chicken-fried steak and such. One lady who, granted, had a good bit more to carry than the rest, wanted to take a taxi back, but got out-voted by those who preferred to walk off their dinner. After a block or so of grumbled mutterings such as "this is b.s...this is total b.s.", I think we relieved her of some of her bags. The other was the next night, when two of the ladies wanted to go back to that very same Texan restaurant for dinner again, but the rest of us wanted to try some of the local fare. We had an amicable parting of the ways on that one.
One thing we could all agree upon (well, except maybe for AM) was that this taxi ride, where the driver took an uncommon shine to her, and couldn't seem to keep his hands off of her, causing her friends in the back seat to laugh so hard they probably left a few wet spots on the seat, was one of the highlights of the trip...
second only to stumbling upon a Baskin Robbins ice cream parlor! Oh yeah, and one more thing. I think we all agreed that these shopping trips with the girls, no matter how brief...well, it's a tough job, but someone's gotta do it!
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The beer stein was the Selangor Pewter Factory that we visited and where we made a few purchases. Napkin rings, wine holders, and picture frames were the majority of the purchases. The driver was impressed with my language skills and thought l could be one of his wives. I had forgotten about Peggy protesting the walk. We went for Malaysian food and had noodles of some kind, similar to pad thai. AM
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