On September 7th, I, along with a few committee members from Tourism Club, went on a trip to the MATTA (Malaysian Association of Tour and Travel Agents) Fair at Putra World Trade Centre.

The few people who came to this fair with me are committee members of an upcoming trip to Hong Kong. As the appointed advisor to this project, I skipped a Friday class to come with them, but not at all unwillingly, of course, since Friday classes are insanely boring~!

The main purpose of this visit is to obtain information and quotations for a trip to Hong Kong, and with the information we could organize the trip on our own, without requiring the actual services of travel agents.

Being sufficiently familiar with Hong Kong myself, and with the full dedication of the committee members, I believe that we can organize a more interesting and cost-efficient trip than, in my opinion, the travel agents!

Once we were there, we scoured almost every corner of the fair for promotional fliers, price sheets, trip packages, and also talked and collected a lot of information from different travel agents.

It’s still very funny, thinking back how we continuously sat down at random travel agents’ booths, demanded tonnes of information and material from them; and just when the agents thought we were genuinely interested, we’d shamelessly stand up, thank them for the information, and walk away! Haha!

But that’s our right as consumers, isn’t it?

Apart from informational stuff, we also got a lot of other things, such as balloons!

Representatives from Taiwan and Korea tourism industries were giving out free balloons, and our group took so many that it was very easy to tell precisely where we were at, as there were so many balloons bobbling above our heads!

In fact, we took so many balloons that some passerby parents thought we were distributing balloons and asked if we could give some to their children! LOL! But, of course, how could we refuse!

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After we left PWTC and headed for dinner, Eric’s car, which I was in, refused to cooperate with that day’s good mood and broke down.

We had known that something was wrong with the car during the journey TO the fair, because the engine temperature had been rising at an extreme speed, reaching boiling point in every thirty minutes.

So, Eric parked the car beside the road while we waited for the engine to cool down. As we were waiting, an Indian guy on a motorcycle stopped and asked if we needed any help.

This guy claimed that he’s a mechanic of BMW, and showed us a BMW logo on his jacket, which, suspiciously, looked like the kind of jacket that you can buy at any Pasar Malam‘s for fifteen Ringgit.

Well, he could be a real BMW mechanic, of course! I’m merely remarking upon the possibility of him being a fake one~~

The BMW guy checked the car and told us that the ventilator a.k.a. ‘fan‘ has stopped, and that he could help us get a new one if we agreed to pay him forty bucks for the trouble, and another hundred and thirty Ringgit for the ‘fan’.

You know, it sounded suspicious, and we knew instinctively that it was an obvious overcharge. But since the guy said that we could pay him after he’s bought and replaced the fan, and none of us were really good in repairing cars, we accepted his offer.

It turned out that the guy really knew what he was doing! He came back with the ventilator, replaced it with the broken one, and started the engine. Everything was fine!

We were grateful, of course, but we still thought that we could have done with a cheaper price. So we bargained with him and ended up paying him a hundred and fifty bucks for everything, which he accepted anyway.

Come on, there’s no need to feel sorry for him! I’m sure that he’s still profited from our transaction!

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