Great service at Ahyu Hotel

Some time ago, I wrote about the food I had in KL. Now this post will be about the hotel room.

We booked a room in Ahyu Hotel, which we found had great reviews online. The room was a double room, but later we requested a twin room instead. When my friend went downstairs to ask whether we could change the room, I took the opportunity to snap a few photos of the double room.

There is only one hanger on the hook here; but the other room had two hangers, one for each of us. Not sure whether the second hanger in this room got stolen, or was somewhere else in the room.

Our actual room:

The room is exactly the same as the double room, except for the beds. They had a hair-dryer provided in a drawer.

One morning after pulling the sheets up at night, I noticed that they provide orthopedic mattresses!

This hotel is rather new, so everything looks nice inside. The outside is also recently painted, I think.

This hotel is really very good in both location and service; it is very close to the Masjid Jamek LRT station (maybe 5 minutes walk?). When we couldn't get hot water from the shower, we went downstairs to ask about it, and they came to show us how to work on the settings. When the man came with me to the room, he actually stepped back and told me to go in and get "ready" first (I can't remember the exact words), so that we don't have all our girl's stuff lying around, I guess.

One power socket (the one near the kettle) was working on and off (we had to hold the plug in place to make sure it didn't cut off), so we told them about it upon checkout. They also thanked us nicely for telling them, and immediately called someone on a walkie-talkie to look into it.

The only drawback (for racist people :P ) is that the hotel is located in Little India.

Bear in motion

There's a lot of motion going on in this photo, but most notable of all is the VIP bear!

This was during our company dinner; there were two bears there during registration. I assume they were for entertainment's sake; for people to take photos with. Here's a photo with the other bear:

Small country

It isn't often that you find a country small enough to hold in the palm of your hand!

Because the theme was country, and Taiwan seems to love making geographically-shaped key-chains. I have a few similar ones without even having been to Taiwan!

Bandung and charcoal

May I remind you of the mee bandung that I mentioned previously?

I brought my parents there. They said the mee bandung was good, but the char kuey teow was better! Here, take a look:

mee bandung

char kuey teow

In the char kuey teow, there are two prawns at the bottom of the plate

This is a continuation of the previous post about food with the parents. We also made another visit to Kim Hin at Sg Dua. We ordered the same dishes as before, plus a new dish of clams.

charcoal tofu with abalone sauce, RM15

four heavenly gods, RM12

lemon steamed clams, RM12
(photo taken after we had eaten a few clams)

salted egg mantis prawns, RM15

signature pork ribs, RM24

The prices have gone up a bit. We ordered a medium portion of tofu this time, since we didn't have enough of the small portion last time. But this time it didn't seem to taste that good. We could have done with a small portion! The pork ribs were also a medium portion, and the rest were small ones, but they don't look too small, do they?

That's not your car!

As I reached my car after buying my dinner, I saw someone trying to open the back door :O Her daughter was calling to her, "Ma, that's not our car!" After that I think I saw them in an Atos (I don't know the car, I was driving behind it and saw its "name tag"), which was a similar colour as my car, of course!

I wanted to laugh so much that I kept smiling, but I still didn't dare to smile too much because I was afraid that the driver of their car (a man who was with them) would see me in the rear-view mirror and recognize me. I still want to laugh when I think of this. :D

No details missing

Just finished reading "Missing, Presumed" by Susie Steiner. I started it long ago and stopped at about fifty pages in (I know because my bookmark was there). This time, I had forgotten what I had read so I started again from the beginning.

The reviews on the cover say "gripping", "beautifully written", "I didn't want it to end", "excellent writing and memorable characters".

I say, no way. The first half was filled with awfully long (and boring) descriptions of the characters and their inner thoughts. Very very detailed thoughts of the main detective and her obsession with finding Mr. Right. Other characters were similarly described, and it got so bad that I skimmed through some parts. It was like the story was progressing really slowly because of these side stories.

The second half was better, probably because there were no more descriptions to give? Overall, the plot was quite okay, and I think I would have found it quite decent if there hadn't been so many digressions into the thoughts of many characters. "I didn't want it to end"? To me, it was more like I couldn't wait for it to end! I was thinking, just get on with the story, would you?

Couldn't hurt a fly

There were two flies buzzing around in my kitchen. I opened the window extra-wide, but they still wouldn't go out. The good thing is that they didn't come near my food (were they in some sort of courtship dance?), but the bad thing is that they were flying around erratically and the buzzing was so loud, it was driving me mad.

As murderous thoughts entered my head regarding these flies, I recalled the saying "he couldn't hurt a fly". That saying just took on a new meaning. It wasn't that I was too kind to kill the flies; I just knew I wasn't quick enough to swat them.

Recycled themes

Time for some overdue Photo Fridays.

The past three weeks, the photo themes are all duplicates of what I have received before. (each theme links to the previous photo)

First up, water.

Second, autumn.

And third, macro.

The "autumn" photo is a fake autumn... since the plant probably has this colour all year long! But it is an autumnal colour, so it's better than green leaves :P

As for the "macro" photo, can you recognize it as the legs of my Venusaur?

And as a bonus photo, I actually took this photo for the "macro" theme too:

This is a selfie stick that a friend bought me. But then I thought it wasn't "macro" enough (from the picture, it looks like it could be further away), so Venusaur won out to be used for this theme.

Teochew and Eastern

As always, when the parents are here, we go out to eat. This time there are four places of note to post about.

The first one is Goh Teo Kee which we had visited before. This time we took one of their sets, which cost RM98 (excluding rice and drinks, and also before adding service charge or any taxes).

The set consists of four dishes and a soup, and also dessert of the day (which was watermelon slices for us).

water chestnut prawn balls and Thai chicken rolls

The water chestnut prawn balls are the same as the one we had previously, but this dish is bigger with Thai chicken rolls (basically something like lor bak).

crispy soft-shell crab

fishball and seaweed soup

The soup was basically good; not so special, but the fishballs were springy (aka "q"). There were four of us, and we got two fishballs each. The soup came in a pot, and server ladled the soup into our individual bowls. The pot was placed on our table so that we could take more soup if we wanted, but before we did that, the server had come for a "second round" of serving, which emptied the pot (and made more space on our table).

Teochew steamed fish

Again, generally good, not so special. my mother was looking for the tofu, "why no tofu in this Teochew steamed fish?"

For veggies, we ordered sambal belacan sweet potato leaves, which is exactly the same as what we had before, so I didn't take a photo.

All in all, our first visit there was better. We could have ordered the same dishes again, but we just wanted to try a few different dishes.

After hearing the price of this, Snorlax said that Eastern Wishes costs about the same, did we want to try it? So we went there the following weekend.

black pepper crispy squid (M) - RM20.70

This was a recommended item. When it arrived, I thought it was chicken. Then we realized that it was the squid. This is really good!

fuyong egg (M) - RM12.50

The fuyong egg here is actually special, with a slightly flowy interior. Unlike some places where it's just like normal fried egg... The fuyong egg contains meat and prawns as well.

sanpei chicken (S) - RM13

salted egg mantis prawn (S) - RM15

signature tofu (S) - RM12

All the dishes were good, except for the signature tofu which we couldn't properly appreciate.

Instead of drinks, we ordered two desserts.

tab tim grob - RM4.30

cendol - RM4.30

What's special about the desserts is that instead of water chestnut for the red pieces in the tab tim grob, they used pieces of sago. The green pieces in the "cendol" are also sago instead of cendol. But they tasted good, so I guess it's a good adaptation.

The total price was RM89.90 after adding 6% service tax. Cheaper than Goh Teo Kee above. And taking into account that we ordered a set (instead of à-la-carte) at Goh Teo Kee, Eastern Wishes is definitely cheaper!

I said there were four places... but let's stop here, and I'll post about the other two places in a few days.