Thursday night was spent in a city I am all too familiar with - Johore Bahru. I studied in UTM for four years after high school.
I spent more time travelling than working, to be perfectly honest - altogether 12 hours was spent in and out of the plane and the airports. The actual work was all wrapped up in just half a day(!) I even had time to do a little shopping before catching a cab to the airport.
I stayed in a rather old hotel in the city, the Mutiara JB. Nothing really spectacular. There were supposed to be 142 rooms "just refurbished:, but I doubt that my room was one of them.
What I did like about the place, however, was the availability of wireless internet access almost throughout the whole premise
IMHO, JB still looks the way it did about five years back - wide roads and buildings with little character. Unlike Penang with its colonial history, or always-evolving KL. I wasn't about to stay longer than what my work called for.
What did pique my interest in JB this time was this restaurant located at the Tebrau area. Our contractor, who played host, drove us through the industrial zone, then through an urban housing area and finally through some brush to reach the place.
The restaurant was located in the middle of a fishing village. What struck me about this place was that it directly faced the Johor-Singapore Causeway and, more interestingly, the ultra-impressive Sembawang Shipyard in Singapore. Close enough for a swimmer on an energy-efficient front crawl to reach, it looked.
It was a rather stark contrast - wooden houses on stilts above the water, with shirtless children at the helms of small wooden fishing boats cruising past the huge ships (including this gargantuan FPSO under construction).
Whatever faults JB has, I don't see them at the Senai airport - shiny and themed on the malay wau and pottery (tembikar). I had tea at the Lavender Bistro, where I fell in love with the decor - pretty glass jars filled with water and a single piece of foliage.
The sunlight streaming through the display and the floating foliage lend a rather ethereal aura to the whole place. It was a really pretty way of segregating the seating areas.
I had two dinners! One at the MAS Golden Lounge - one of the nicest Mee Jawa I tasted in a while, and a prawn sambal meal during the flight itself.
After 40 minutes in the cab, an hour and a half at the Senai Airport, another half an hour in KLIA and another 2 and a half on the plane I finally touched down in Miri.
Now - let the weekend begin!
I spent more time travelling than working, to be perfectly honest - altogether 12 hours was spent in and out of the plane and the airports. The actual work was all wrapped up in just half a day(!) I even had time to do a little shopping before catching a cab to the airport.
I stayed in a rather old hotel in the city, the Mutiara JB. Nothing really spectacular. There were supposed to be 142 rooms "just refurbished:, but I doubt that my room was one of them.
What I did like about the place, however, was the availability of wireless internet access almost throughout the whole premise
IMHO, JB still looks the way it did about five years back - wide roads and buildings with little character. Unlike Penang with its colonial history, or always-evolving KL. I wasn't about to stay longer than what my work called for.
What did pique my interest in JB this time was this restaurant located at the Tebrau area. Our contractor, who played host, drove us through the industrial zone, then through an urban housing area and finally through some brush to reach the place.
The restaurant was located in the middle of a fishing village. What struck me about this place was that it directly faced the Johor-Singapore Causeway and, more interestingly, the ultra-impressive Sembawang Shipyard in Singapore. Close enough for a swimmer on an energy-efficient front crawl to reach, it looked.
It was a rather stark contrast - wooden houses on stilts above the water, with shirtless children at the helms of small wooden fishing boats cruising past the huge ships (including this gargantuan FPSO under construction).
Whatever faults JB has, I don't see them at the Senai airport - shiny and themed on the malay wau and pottery (tembikar). I had tea at the Lavender Bistro, where I fell in love with the decor - pretty glass jars filled with water and a single piece of foliage.
The sunlight streaming through the display and the floating foliage lend a rather ethereal aura to the whole place. It was a really pretty way of segregating the seating areas.
I had two dinners! One at the MAS Golden Lounge - one of the nicest Mee Jawa I tasted in a while, and a prawn sambal meal during the flight itself.
After 40 minutes in the cab, an hour and a half at the Senai Airport, another half an hour in KLIA and another 2 and a half on the plane I finally touched down in Miri.
Now - let the weekend begin!
No comments:
Post a Comment