I'm back in 2009!

To all my cyber friends I've missed wishing Merry Christmas to, a very happy 2009 to you! I'm finally back, after a hectic school holidays. In case you're wondering where this lady has gone to, she's gone on a long retreat....lol.... The truth is, my house was undergoing a major renovation from mid Nov to end Dec and the whole family had to move out to stay with my inlaws. Can't explain how glad I was to be able to finally move back near Christmas.

Here's a glimpse of what my new home looks like.

Kitchen (the most important place to me)





IKEA systems for the drawers (I simply love them!)




My son's room



Master Toilet



Common Toilet




The ID (interior designer) we've engaged is Peter Tan from IdealHouse. We got to know him from the renotalk forum. Overall, I'm happy with his service. He's responsive and takes the extra mile to help me along in the whole reno project. There're a few small hiccups along the way, as with most reno projects, but all finally resolved.


Besides this big project, my family also went to A'Famosa for a short trip during the school holidays. The kids are the ones who've enjoyed themselves thoroughly, as usual. If you ask me what's my impression of that place, well, just said that I won't be going back a second time. It is not that bad (though we've got several "complains"), just not a place I would put in my rotation list.

There are limited places to eat in the resort. Although there were a total of three places serving breakfast, you'll soon realise it's quite meaningless to go to different places as they serve exactly the same food! So we had most of our breakfast at Sunshine Cafe which was the only one serving buffet breakfast. Refill was mostly slow and people practically grab up the popular items once they were out. I remembered one of the nights we wanted to have our dinner at the cafe, only to be told that the kitchen would not be able to take our orders, because the only chef there was busy preparing food for an ongoing conference and was in a bad mood...huh??...that was our reaction.

Let's talk about the attractions there. Animal World was good. We spent one full day there. The shows were pretty good and we like the safari ride which took us to see the animals in the wild. We were all seated in locked up trucks, which made us look like animals in the zoo. Hey, maybe it's the animals watching us and not the other way round.

Water World was a disappointment. There wasn't many rides suitable for young kids. And you'll have to climb one long flight of steps before taking the more thrilling rides. My husband was commenting it was comparable to about 5 or 6 flights of steps. By the time you reached the starting point, you would have tired out. What disappoint me was, again the food. We had planned to have our lunch in one of the restaurants in the Water World (after so many consecutive meals at Sunshine Cafe and similar). Guess what? The restaurant was opened, but not in operation. What is a restaurant with no food? Might as well not open it, something which I fail to comprehend.

Cowboy Town was basically a big funfair carnival. The carnival show which ended with fireworks was good. It was like watching Chingay live, with all the colorful floats. It basically showcased what they had in the entire resort. The only disappointment was, it started to rain cats and dogs not long after the show. So our plan to stay there to enjoy the games was ruined again. We had to wait for the rain to get smaller before we can make our way back to the hotel.

Accommodation was not too bad. We stayed at Beverly Hills Condotel, which is essentially a condo, quite spacious for the 5 of us. Transportation to the various attractions was by banana truck, which is an open bus. However, each person had to pay RM1 for each trip. This was another thing we couldn't understand. The different attractions were packaged as part of the resort, why is internal transportation not included?

Well, overall the experience was still fair. You probably would want to visit it once in your life. As to revisiting, probably not.


Mood: dozing off