Cheers! in Malaysia's oldest Bar / Pub

 

Ipoh is home of the fabled white coffee. And the bar / pub that currently holds the record as being the oldest in the country. The Sinhalese Bar is perched on the corner opposite Concubine Lane, which makes is a great spot to veer to when exploring the town centre. 

Step through the Cowboy Saloon doors and feel home in an instant: Friendly guests and staff will immediately engage in a conversation, adding you to the family of patrons. Have a cold beer, as advertised outside and kick back for a while as you step back into a time before fancy cocktails, dry ice effects and hipster juices. 

Cheers!

Day Trip to Qing Xin Ling Leisure & Cultural Village

 

Step back in time, get a different perspective! On the outskirts of Ipoh, Malaysia, one will find the Qing Xin Ling Leisure & Cultural Village. From Kuala Lumpur, it takes just about two hours to drive there and it is easily accessible. 

Went on Saturday morning, the place is easy to find and very accessible. The free parking is a plus. 

And it is a tremendous amount of fun, totally worth the admission fee! The "village" offers a glimpse into the days past of Malaysia, highly informative and entertaining. Luckily, it is not as stiff and formal as a museum. 

With the various examples of cultural heritage scattered around, it also becomes highly "interactive" as one gets to experience how things work, for instance pulling a rikshaw. One has to bring the inner child to have fun though. 

 

Learned Nothing

 

(Original picture taken by me while on the way to work. This is on Federal Highway heading towards KLCC. We were all stuck in a jam, so my car wasn't moving at the time of the snap)

Apparently, the pandemic has allowed us to re-evaluate some things. The spread of the Corona virus was to be stemmed by taking simple precautions. Here I find myself wondering about this as I observe:

- People standing so close to me when they line up for anything that they are competing with my clothes for skin contact

- Food sellers don't wear masks. Their customers do. I already have a small issue with the vendors handling money, then the produce, then scratch their behind, smoke while they hover over the goods....

- What is it with these buttons we now have to press to open doors instead of motion sensors? 

- A nearby supermarket sells frozen beef / lamb / chicken cubes. There are thongs to handle the meats. Of course, some fella is in the freezer, up to his shoulders and grappling EVERY single bit of frozen meat with his bare hands....

- Rubbish everywhere, of the mask type. Since when is it ok to just throw your used face mask into the street. Oh wait, yes, we like a good flooding and clogging up the drains will help. 

Final Check

These are the Ozalids for the latest issues of Asian Trucker and Asian Buses. These are print-outs, in two formats, on different paper. This is to show the colours of the final print (Let's not get too technical as I know that there will be differences with the print is going to be on the actual paper etc) and to find the last tiny mistakes. 

Even though we look at the material over and over, we still find the nastiest mistakes only in the print-out. Bizarrely, one does not "see" the mistakes when looking at a PDF. 

Once each of these pages is checked, they are signed and send back to the printer. And that marks the start of the actual printing process of the magazines. It is also always a very elating feeling as this concludes the work on one issue, whereby each is unique, with a lot of heart and soul injected. It is also the starting point for the creation of the next issues. 
 

Unusual Menu Items

 

Ended up in a small town near to the Taman Negara national park. During Ramadan, the best bet is to steer to Chinese restaurants before 6pm to have dinner. Many other places might be closed or are extremely busy with those waiting to break their fast during their festive month (We found McDonalds closed during lunch. We assume a lack of customers during this time). 

Apparently, the Fish Lips Soup is a thing. One would cut off the lips, dry them, then make soup with it, adding other ingredients. We were later told that this restaurant was once famous for Monkey Head Soup. Well, they could keep that, no interest. Same goes for Sharkfin Soup. Personally, never understood the hype about it as it is a dish that you HAVE to add vinegar to in order to give it some taste. 

Among the other, rather delicious, dishes we had was the coconut flower soup. Something never seen before, but stunningly nice:

You Better not Run Through the Jungle

 

Back in Secondary School we would learn about rainforests and how they are vital for the planet as the source of Oxygen, our lungs so to say. We read about the largest ones to be around the Amazonas and in Malaysia. I have been to the jungle in Malaysia before, but this time it was a different part, a different landscape. 

Taman Negara is a vast national park in Malaysia on the Malay peninsula. It encompasses a sprawling tropical rainforest that's said to be 130 million years old. The tourist brochure recommends a different route in, while we started off from a small town "nearby", called Jerantut. Amazing place that, one of these surprising little places that wow you with great food and interesting sights. 

What an amazing ride. 200 Km through the rainforest. At 7am, we had fog like this. The entire stretch is just mall roads, one curve after the other. There are a lot of bumps and in places, parts of the road had been washed away. It was SUPER silent as the forest and fog muffles everything. One leg we drove for 1 hour and there was not another vehicle! The setting and atmosphere reminded of the 1977 movie Sorcerer. 

Most of the other vehicles on the road (of which there were VERY few) are timber jinkers. Getting into these camps is something else as there are no roads. The drivers of these trucks will carry the timber all over Malaysia, sometimes only coming home to see their family once in 2 weeks. We went past houses, schools and clinics in the middle of nowhere. Not a supermarket in sight. Or a petrol station. It seems that one would have to fill the tank every time one goes to town. 

An abandoned burger stall served as a marker to slow down to stop at the Bukit Awan, the Cloud Hill. At around 8:30, there was nothing but fog. Sadly, people that use this rest stop just litter and there was a lot of rubbish strewn around in this otherwise nicely placed and constructed viewpoint. The view was magnificent once the fog lifted in the late morning. We stopped many times to snap pictures, plug some flowers. Even with no traffic, the roads are quiet demanding as they are narrow. Overtaking trucks is an adventure and buffalo grazing might just lumber onto the roads. 

Lots of the old Mercedes "911", the Short Nose, are still in operation around here, hauling timber. These trucks seem to be indestructible. And those that have exhausted their last Diesel still make for fantastic motifs for photos. Like these two. One can only wonder what these trucks have endured and how much cargo they have hauled in decades of service. 

Dark Mood on

 

Big cities sometimes make for stunning moods.... Especially when it rains here, the setting is something that could be used in any good (or real bad) Sci-Fi movie. 

How Much Get Movie Critics Paid?

 "Movie Critic" is  a job as I understand it. I find it fascinating that one could make enough money with writing reviews of movies. There are what, two or three new movies a week? Being a movie critic would certainly not be a job that is based on volume produced. Surely, one would have to spend time watching each movie, some maybe even twice, then do research, and also know stuff around the world of cinema. 

Yet, I am intrigued by the fact that one could make a living with this. Or do movie critics have side incomes? Or is being a movie critic a side income?

No, I don't mean to belittle the profession as I oftentimes read reviews before watching a flick. I am just curious about how this works.