Today was our last full day in KL and so we took it easy. It had been a great trip and we had seen and done quite a lot so far, so today we just did some last minute shopping and nothing too exciting.
Sarma had left quite early in the morning to go to work, so the rest of us slept in a little and had some breakfast before heading back to Low Yat to see what advice the salesman from last night had to offer. After managing to get to Low Yat without Sarma’s help we just strolled around for a little bit.
We had 2 goals for Low Yat, the first being to find the salesman from last night and the second being to find a shop that would let Anthony test his new USB-to-HDMI adapter. The shop he bought it from couldn’t test it because they didn’t sell TV’s or monitors - which is ironic for the “King of Low Yat”.
We found the salesman and I showed him the converter. He took my camera from me and set it to auto and took a shot, then zoomed in on the outside edges of the shot to show me how soft it was - which is what I had been complaining about. Then he showed me the exposure settings and set the camera to manual mode and put the same settings in, but adjusted the aperture to be a lot smaller. This photo obviously came out a lot darker, then he fitted a fancy ring flash and took the shot again - the difference was clear and he explained that this converter may not be too useful for landscapes, but for events I could use an external flash to maximize the light to allow me small apertures.
He was obviously trying to sell me a flash, but as I told him that I already have an external flash, he then tried selling them to Anthony and Amy too. He was a friendly guy and did give us some good advice, but was very much hoping it would lead to sales for him. The flashes were quite good too, they were not a brand I had heard of before, but this one tilted in 2 directions, had a power control and remote sensing so you could use it wirelessly. My flash can only tilt on one axis and had no external controls at all, but it was Nikon and cost me about $150 at the time, while after some debate he offered us these flashes for the same price. It was a good deal, but I really didn’t need to spend the money and Anthony and Amy weren’t ready to either. He wanted us to buy something from him, so we ended up buying some cheap cleaning brushes, thanked him for his advice and left.
We had brought a USB cable and a USB power adapter with us and asked a few shops if we could test Anthony’s new adapter, but all of them said that they were not allowed to, until eventually we found a large store where Anthony was able to quickly plug it in to a display model tv and saw that it worked. If Anthony couldn’t have tested it with his phone, he was going to bring it back, but all was good.
From Low Yat Plaza we walked down the street to check out The United Buddy Bears World Tour. We had seen these bears a couple of times in passing, but never stopped to check them out until now. The display includes a painted bear that has come from each country in the united nations and is a symbol of international peaceful co-existence. Each country paints there own bear in a style that is symbolic to them, for example Australia’s bear was painted in a traditional Aboriginal style, while USA’s bear was made to look like the Statue Of Liberty. Some of them were really well done!
As all these bears were on display in front of the “Pavilion” mall, we went inside to find an ATM and grab a snack before going back to the hotel. The mall was decorated in preparation for the Chinese New Year and had a massive dragon hanging from the ceiling. These decorations where all over the city, but these ones where probably the biggest we had seen.
We eventually found an ATM, but it was malfunctioning and being the nerds that we are, we had to take a photo of an ATM with a windows desktop on it.
Sarma is a bit of a coffee-a-holic and had been going on about a place called “The Coffee Bean” - which is just like a starbucks or whatever, so we decided to give it a go for our last day and got some drinks before heading back to the hotel. I got a really nice cold drink that had strawberry, banana and vanilla in it - very tasty!
We went back to the hotel to do a bit of blogging and planned to have a swim before meeting up with Sarma for dinner, but ended up running out of time. Sarma had been away from Melbourne for about a year now and when we spoke to him he said one of the things he missed was Nando’s. Well there is Nando’s in KL, but the reason he avoided it was because the price of the food there was really high compared to the average wage in KL, so from the start of the trip we kept telling him that we would buy him a Nando’s meal while we where over. So for our last dinner in KL, we went to Nando’s.
Nando’s is a little different in KL, the menu is a bit more strange with items such as an “Angry Mango Burger” (which they were sold out of) and instead of a Mild Peri-Peri sauce, they had a Garlic Peri-Peri sauce. I don’t like hot stuff and ordered my usual “Lemon and Herb” sauce, but their version of this sauce was a lot more spicy that I’m used to, which I wasn’t big on. We all enjoyed our meal, but about an hour later all four of us felt sick!
This was not good for our last night - there’s nothing worse that having an upset stomach on a plane where the toilet-to-people ratio is so low, but we survived ok - even Sarma felt sick all day at work.
The other thing we had been talking to Sarma about (randomly) was Monty Python - he had never heard of it before and during our trip, whenever we passed anyone selling dvd’s, whether it was a bootleg stand or a proper store, we’d ask them if they had it and we couldn’t find it anywhere.
So that night we bought some junk food, went home, setup a laptop and managed to find enough clips of Monty Python and the Holy Grail on YouTube to educate him. Then we made it his holy quest to seek out a proper copy of the movie.
Between breaks and after the movie we all packed our luggage so we were ready to checkout in the morning. This time I spoke to the concierge and booked a taxi to airport for 9:00 AM - that gives us an hour to get to the airport which will mean we will be there the recommended 3 hours before our flight at approx 1:00 PM - unlike the fine cut when we left Singapore.