Padang Besar

The original plan was to head back to KL on Tuesday. However, Julia - my sister - and her family will arrive on Monday and it was rather rushed to head home without spending the day with her family. We then decided to head back on the Wednesday instead. While waiting for Julia to travel all the way up from Melaka, we decided to go up north to Padang Besar to do some shopping.

Padang Besar is a border town in Perlis, where one can get cheap knock-offs from Thailand. Everything from shoes, handbags, watches and football jerseys can be found there. Puan Anita wanted to look for some rugs and clothes. The journey up took just under two hours even though we made the mistake of following my Nokia GPS direction. It took us via some kampongs and Arau town. My auntie who was traveling on another slower car managed to catch up with us since our route were much slower. We arrived there around noon. Finding a parking spot was not straight forward however. After driving around for a good 15 minutes, we finally decided to park at the side of a road, and had to walk half a kilometer to the nearest bazaar.

I mainly just walked around since I did not plan to buy anything. We got some toys for the boys to keep them quiet while Anita and my Mum and Auntie went out to shop. Finally, even Anita was disappointed. It was not that there were nothing to buy, the problem was, the bazaar was full of shops which basically sell the same stuffs. All the knock-offs looked the same, at a same fixed price. There was no variety. But the place was jam packed. I was not sure what others were buying actually.

After a couple of hours, hungry, we decided to head home. We took a different route this time, driving towards Sintok, joining the PLUS Highway there. Sintok is where UUM campus is. The nearest town to the campus was Changloon, and we stopped there for a late lunch. We finally made it to Sungai Petani at around 5, before joining Julia and her family at my Aunt’s place later that evening.