A Holiday, Rerouted
Sunday, August 30, 2026 at 9:02PM 
Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA public holiday has a particular texture to it — Maulidur Rasul meant the day arrived already excused from its usual obligations, which is a fine way for any Tuesday to introduce itself. Even the ward round agreed to the mood, starting later than usual, unhurried, the sort of pace that suggests the day itself knows it's off duty even if a few small duties remain. Nothing wrong with a slow start on a day built for one.
From there, lunch at the Shangri-La, which does the thing it does well without needing to announce it — good room, good food, the sort of meal that settles a person rather than merely feeding them. No fuss required when the setting's already doing half the work. Suitably fortified, the plan turned toward KLCC, with genuine intentions of seeing what Ombak, the new mall that's gone up across the way, actually looks like on the inside rather than from the road.
That plan lasted about as long as plans made before actually arriving somewhere tend to. The air outside had that hazy, slightly apologetic quality that passes for "not great" on the air quality index, and Ombak, being new and shiny and much discussed, had drawn exactly the crowd you'd expect a new and shiny and much-discussed thing to draw on a holiday. Between the two — bad air, worse queues — the appeal thinned out fairly quickly. Some places are worth fighting a crowd for. A first look at a mall, on a hazy day, is not one of them.
So, sensibly, a detour: Kinokuniya instead, which never seems to mind being the second choice, possibly because it knows it'll usually win you over anyway. There's a particular calm to wandering shelves with no fixed target, the sort of browsing that isn't really about buying anything so much as being somewhere quiet and full of other people's finished thoughts. A proper antidote to a crowded mall, as it turns out — trade the crush for the stacks and somehow come out more relaxed than you went in.
The day rounded itself off nicely with ice chocolate at Ralph Lauren's new café, which is a slightly improbable sentence to type but a genuinely pleasant way to spend twenty minutes — the sort of spot that's clearly designed to be photographed, and manages to be worth sitting in anyway, which isn't always guaranteed. A good drink, a good sit-down, and by then the day had more or less made its point.
Home early after that, no argument from anyone. A holiday spent half as planned and half improvised, which if you think about it is roughly the correct ratio — the improvised bits nearly always turn out to be the better half. Ombak will still be there once the air's cleared and the crowds have thinned to something reasonable. No rush. That's rather the point of a day like this.
New Collection
I have always been interested in books. No, I was not a bookworm, and I am used to the idea of having books around me. When I was a student, I had always wished that the books I had with me to read would be on subjects they won't be asking in exams.
Now that the demand on the kind of material I had to consume by reading had lessened - I tended to take in new journals on my iPad - I thought I would rekindle that interest.
I plan to start collecting books - of the coffee-table kind for the new apartment. I would also have a shelf housing all the books. These would be the kinds full of pictures and covers my passion and interest.
New York, San Francisco, Paris, skyscrapers and old Malay houses in kampungs had always fascinated me. And on top of this all would be the history of Kuala Lumpur, the city I have called my home and where I would be raising my children.
A lot of people always had this idea that Kuala Lumpur was just a concrete jungle. Well, that was true because the people living there let it to. There were plenty to discover about Kuala Lumpur, its rich history and how it had flourished over the years. Unfortunately, these rich history would be eroded with the foreign migrant coming into Malaysia, from which the large majority reside in this beautiful city.
To start off the collection, I bought a nice skyscraper book from KLCC yesterday, to add on a collection of New York photo essay I picked up last week. It's gonna get exciting!!!