Kuala Lumpur ~ Day 1

I’m currently in Kuala Lumpur. My first travel done in 2009 is for my company’s training. Sure, the idea of training means a week of crunching your brain to absorb anything new that you need to know for your work and managing expectation that you still know what you have learnt on the weeks to come. But that’s not the issue here because actually we had some fun and learnt new useful tips today.

My day 0 to KL started just nice. I got off from the office on time to catch the MRT to Changi airport. Why I’d rather take MRT? Because it’s more predictable. Definitely taxi is more comfortable, but will it take you to the airport in exactly 30 min from Citihall? Not necessary. So I’d rather to stand for a few minutes, and definitely someone will stand up from their sit to get off along the way, after all, Changi is on the end of the line there. Everything went just nice and smoothly. I didn’t even need to queue to check in my luggage. How cool is that? And on top of that, I managed to bag a Vera Wang’s perfume for my DFS splurge. So what’s the drama, you might ask?

When you start to think that everything goes well and just nice, that’s when things started to crumble, and that’s exactly what happened. I reached to my gate for boarding rather early and started flipping the magazine that I snagged from the bookstore at the DFS. Normally I never manage to finish flipping 1 magazine until I board because I’ll also browsing on the Internet. But I realized that after doing all my usual boarding habits, and I even finished flipping, no boarding announcement was aired. Concerns started to crawl onto my face. By that time, my colleague that I was supposed to meet at KL airport sent me sms that she was already there, and waiting for me. That increases the tension as I hate to make people waiting, and the clock did ticking. Just when I got up from my chair to ask the airline people, the announcement started, delay for 30 minutes due to change tire. That ticked me off because they wait until last minute to announce making people wonder. Then, another 30 minutes passed, still nothing happened. By this time, migraine was soon to visit my brain.

I was so relieved when they finally started to do boarding and finally take off. But, during the short flight, I couldn’t even close my eyes to rest (even with the easing my mind with my fave Jpop numbers) because exactly behind my seat was a bunch of annoying brats thinking that they flied by private jet. They shrieked, yelled, brawled all the way to KL with no intent at all to lower their voice, and worse, their conversations were all non sense. So annoyance was added to my already stress injected brain. And off course the annoyance doesn’t stop there. The queue on the immigration was even more annoying than those brats. I felt like such a bitch to complain about custom queue. But who wouldn’t whine if the other queue run MUCH faster and you’re stuck with immovable queue for another 20 minutes.

I still got the feeling that what happened next was the result of all my whining. On my baggage claim rail, I chipped almost half of my nail when I picked up my red luggage. Sure, I didn’t feel the tingling feeling (thought that it’s caused from lifting the heavy luggage), but I was dead wrong. The blood was not so obviously seen with my finger lingered around my red luggage (and with the addition of my bit blur mind) until it dropped. By the time it dropped, it already clotted my finger. So I came up to meet my colleague (so proud of her for waiting on me all that time) with 1 bloody finger. What amazed me about KL airport was you can’t really get through the airport people until you start to speak Malay. Yes, they understand English, but it seems to me that they respond the way you want them to when you converse to them in Malay. So here I was in the clinic asking for ALCOHOL or any available disinfectant. I don’t know what’s going on in those nurses mind when they see injuries. Normal nurses will clean the wound with ALCOHOL based disinfectant. But apparently not in KL airport. They just gave me water (yes folks, water) for me to dip my wound in there and wrap it with some plaster. I was in horror of the thought that I might get infection. So, to prevent on my day to get worse, I quickly asked for first aid kit as soon as we reached hotel. I’d rather attend to my wound myself after that horrific clinic experience.

So, with my currently disable left index finger, training day 1 passed by. We did lots of exercise and more pressure added because of the time crunches. There was a glitch of lunch and dinner reservation today which was solved beautifully to my boss’ relief. So with that we ended up eating in difference place for lunch and dinner. I loved the cod fish dish dinner. It’s sweet and soft, so you don’t need energy to chew. Then we ended our day by having a short mall trip to the mall nearby. For me, the top priority was definitely buy a supply of band aid to tend to my wound. I can’t imagine staring at my half exposed nail versus flesh all they long with the worry that some germs or whatever making it worse.

On final note, turned out that there’s no such thing as free Wifi in this building. We’re deluding ourselves in reading the sign ‘Wifi on public area’ as ‘Free Wifi.’