Happy Chinese New Year!

Whew! What a tiring weekend! This past weekend, we got a nice taste of good old Chinese New Year, Malaysian style! Saturday night, about 80+ of us Malaysians got together to potluck at this local real estate office's meeting room organized by Caroline. And this wasn't just any potluck. The place was very nicely decorated with CNY flair, with really nostalgic CNY music playing in the background. The food area even had professional style food warmers to prevent our Malaysian dishes from cooling off. The event was racous but VERY VERY filling, with everyone bringing more food that they ate...MMHHMMM.. :) BTW, a great way to assure attendance is to talk about food with us Malaysians...

We adjourned the night and the better part of the next day over at Wee Sen's and Gary+Carol's place. Had tons of fun playing hours upon hours of Blackjack while eating home made Malaysian snacks! Blackjack is definitely a lot more fun played Malaysian style ( double payout on - 21, 5 card, triple payout on - double aces, 5 card + 21 ) than Casino style...
All in all, a very very fun filled weekend! Certainly nice to have a weekend celebrating CNY even if the rest of KC doesn't really care!

LA Here we Come!

We were in warm(er) Los Angeles metro last weekend in shorts and sandals! What a way to spend a weekend after a frigid cold one almost a week before! Nothing like a last minute trip in winter to the West Coast to start the year off! Yeesin had a work meeting to get to at Chatsworth, CA, which is about 45 minutes from L.A. So, I bought a last minute ticket there via Southwest ($69 each way if you can believe it!), and joined her there! I'm seriously considering putting that "Ding" icon on my PC now, if the rates continue to be so cheap!

As you guys probably can see, we stayed by the beach, in particular Venice beach. The hotel wasn't much to look at... she called it "dumpy", but I prefer "utilitarian". Great location tho! it was facing the ocean! For anyone that's interested it was the Venice Beach Suites and Hotel. Still, the weather was nice! And despite the L.A weatherman predicting lots of rain, it barely sprinkled. Apparently, SoCal people don't take their weathermen seriously either! A nice walk on the beach every morning was a great way to wake up, grab a cup of coffee and snack on pastries from Chinatown! Just ignore the hobos, the are part of the experience. :)

Hung out for a while at the Getty Center our first day, which houses a quite impressive collection of Art stuff. Their collections are not as huge as say, the Lourve or the British Museum, but I considered it "bite-sized" pieces of Art from different eras and cultures that most people can get thru in a quick 2-3 hours. Developmental item for them tho, cos they need more signs in their rooms to prevent people from getting lost! Unless.... its their master-plan to get you "lost in Art"... ;) Anyways.. Architecturally, the place is impressive too, built on a huge hill, overlooking West Hollywood, where most of the structure is built from the same stones that the colloseum in Rome was built with! The view at night is pretty cool too, where you can see most of LA, and the tailights of the traffic snaking its way to Downtown!

For the rest of the trip, stopped by Universal Studios for a whole day. Obviously Chinatown too, where we got our pastry supplies, and cheap chinese food. Even stopped by for Dim Sum with Yeesin's vendor and his family! Universal Studios was fun, probably the best show that we saw was the Waterworld one! , followed by the Shrek 4D experience. Also did the studio tour, where we saw a couple of sets in progress, including this shot of Eva Longoria's house on Desperate Housewives! Cool!

All in all, a great short trip. Too bad 3 nights is hardly enough to see LA. Hopefully, Yeesin comes here again more often!!