It’s been so long since I last posted in this blog’s ‘unusual stuff’ category (or indeed posted anything at all ), I’ve decided to add some collections to it.

Check out this mineral water vending ‘machine’. It needs no electricity, no stall owner, no nothing to operate! Lowest operating cost ever.

All it needs is your amanah, and is therefore rightly named: Amanah Kiosk!

You take a bottle, drop RM1 into the metal box, transaction done! No one else even notices!

This stall was found in one of the residential colleges in UM, apparently the university students there are really quite amanah, because I predict that if a similar stall were to be deployed in, say, Cyberia (where most MMU students live), NOTHING would be left, besides the rack.

The stall even says thank you!

Next, is it just me or is this really so cutely weird?

A mini motorcycle! A grown man sitting on it is like shitting on a squat-only toilet while wearing a helmet.

Also check out what’s on the other side of this mineral water bottle!

Remember Fairuz Fauzy, the Malaysian F1 driver? if you’ve been to the cinemas lately you must have seen him in an advertisement where a lameass guy who doesn’t fasten his seat belt drives to the petrol station  and spots this Fairuz guy, who then gives him an autograph and asks him to fasten his seat belt, like ‘Eh, pakailah’… remember?

Well this time he’s here on the mineral bottle asking us to unite and support him with all our combined effort.

But something seems to be really ‘wrong’ with this guy’s attitude!

He’s rolling his eyes!

**********

Sigh… Aiming four flat this semester! No slacking! T_T

Yesterday, I was ill. Had fever, a severe headache, runny nose – essentially all the symptoms of a really bad cold.

In fact, I’m still feeling unwell now, but I think the fever is temporarily under control by medication. Oh… I really hate these rainy days!

Last night, I took my medicine and planned to go to bed rather early; because the next morning my friend and her family were going overseas, and her father charged me with the task of following the family to the airport, driving the car back, and safeguarding two of their cars while they are on vacation.

A fun task, but challenging nevertheless. The car that I was supposed to drive back is a rather huge one – something that I am not that used to driving; and furthermore, it’s manual! I quite suck in handling manual cars, you know! Hehe…

Therefore, with such a task ahead of me, I had to totally get enough sleep, otherwise…

BUT THEN,

It seemed like my current house, which was already in a terrible condition – with annoying wiring and piping problems -, didn’t want this poor guy to get any rest!

Last night, the bathroom on the second floor, whose pipes were already severely blocked and pending repair, gave me a memorable Christmas present by overflowing and literally flooding the whole damn second floor common area!

*All the photos you see in this entry were taken after the major flood was cleared. Everyone was too panicky to take any photos before that! So the real situation was really much worse than what you see in the photos!*

I was preparing to go to bed so I did not notice the water creeping into my room through the slit beneath the door!

No one paid any attention to the loud sound of water flowing down the staircase, all assuming it was the sound of the rain – it’s been raining everyday!

Suddenly, we heard Sebastian yelling from downstairs – “OOOI…!!”

All of us upstairs thought his “OOOI…!!” would be followed by some typical “... create DotA lor!“ or “… yum cha lor!“; but instead, it was “… water coming out from the toilet upstairs ah?!“

When I looked at the direction of my door, I yelped – the door mat was already completely drenched, and part of the carpet was already infected by the eeeky, smelly, disgusting bathroom water!

Opening the door, I was completely stunned on the spot.

The common area between our rooms was filled with moving water! Moving water that was coming out from the abandoned bathroom and flowing down the staircase like a bloody waterfall!

Nick, who occupies the room opposite mine, had his computer sitting on water! (his CPU is on the floor!)

Moving our way downstairs, we saw in terror that half of the living room was flooded with yellowish water!

I half imagined Jon’s pet rabbits would be, like, floating around and struggling and drowning; but of course that did not happen! It wasn’t that serious!

At once we took action. We started barricading the doors with anything that we could find, to prevent more water from getting into the rooms.

It was also at that point when we realized that the internet router, the wire extension, an electrical port, and a jungle of wires were on the floor, drenched in water!

Immediately we switched off everything in the area and put those items on higher ground as Heng stepped into the super-duper disgusting bathroom with a bucket and started transferring the flood water into the toilet.

Apparently the bathroom floor drain and the toilet do not share the same pipe, and very luckily for us, the toilet pipe was not blocked!

You have no idea how disgusting and smelly the trapped water was!

Slowly, the water stopped flowing and we proceeded to the exhausting process of sweeping the water from upstairs to downstairs, and from the living room, out of the house.

It was endless – we kept sweeping but the water was so much that it took a very very long time to clear!

We actually planned to go watch Hitman at Mines that night but no doubt we had to cancel it – of course earlier that day I had already known I wouldn’t be able to go with all the headache and fever, but I didn’t imagine that everyone would be staying home together and clearing a house flood!

After clearing the water, a friend came with a huge pile of newspapers from his house and we put thick layers of paper covering the floor; as it was bound to stink considering that it was bathroom water that had just flooded our house…

… bathroom water, get it? Anything – solid or liquid – from anywhere could be inside! Ewwww!

After the floor became relatively dry, immediately we started washing the stuff that were soaked, including my doormat, some fabric, my bag and other stuff.

One of my new bath towels, which very unfortunately fell into the flood, was disposed of. I don’t think I would dare to use it no matter how many times it is washed!

Everything ended very late that night, and for the whole night we were anxious that it would happen again, while we were sleeping!

Luckily it didn’t!

This afternoon, the agent of our house asked a contractor to come and try to fix the problem, and guess what he said?

“Major blockage, might have to drill walls and stuff…! Err… Let me talk to Cindy first!” (Cindy is the agent)

And he left.

Let’s hope he comes back soon and fixes it soon, I don’t think we can survive the floods for more than a few times!

Everyone knows about the famous Kim Gary restaurants.

I just went for dinner at a branch in The Curve today. While the prices are a little expensive, you’ll always find Kim Gary Restaurants totally full; Apart from its nice and unique dishes, I think it’s also thanks to the uprising ‘yum cha‘ culture among youths in Malaysia.

I think there are 2 main types of ‘yum cha‘ places. The normal kopitiams – Where you sit by the road and drink teh tarik; and the ‘high class’ franchise restaurants – Brands like Kim Gary, Old Town Kopitiam, Wong Kok Char Chan Teng (Wong Kok Hong Kong Restaurant) etc.

Wierdly enough, apparently many of the second type restaurant owners are (or are pretending to be) from Hong Kong!

Just go around the city, and you’ll find ‘Hong Kong styled’ restaurants popping up everywhere! I don’t see a lot of ‘Singapore-styled restaurants’ or ‘Indonesia-styled restaurants’, why Hong Kong?

I also noticed that the so-called ‘high-class’ kopitiams are all adopting the same method for ordering food. Typically, you choose from the menu, mark your order on a piece of paper listed with the names of all the dishes, and a waiter comes to confirm everything and process your order.

I really wonder where are they copying it from! From my experience, they don’t do that in Hong Kong! Hmm…

Anyway, Kim Gary’s menu confirms that ARE Kim Gary branches in Hong Kong, so the boss is obviously not some fat local Ah Beng, whew! Here’s a photo of the menu page:

According to the information in the menu, A few Kim Gary restaurant branches in Hong Kong are called ‘Gary Cafe’, ‘Gary Restaurant’, and ‘Kam Gary Restaurant’. There is also a cute branch name called ‘Apple Restaurant‘, I wonder why…?

• Note: the following story is fictional. (In Case Kim Gary sues me! =)

Maybe the evolution went like this: At first the boss, named Gary, opened his own ‘Gary cafe’. Later, he thought that the word ‘cafe’ was not attractive enough, so he changed the name to ‘Gary Restaurant’.

A couple of years later, he found out that there were too many guys named ‘Gary’ in Hong Kong, so he added his surname into the restaurant’s name, and it became ‘Kam Gary Restaurant’. The Cantonese translation of “金” is “Kam”, after all.

Then, business was booming and Kam Gary Restaurant was expanding globally! Some investors told the boss that perhaps they should change it to ‘Kim Gary Restaurant’ since it would sound more like an international brand… And so ‘Kim Gary Restaurant’ it became.

— end of fictional story —

If the story was true, what do you think the next evolution would be?

I had no idea until I went back to Ipoh last month and saw this banner when I was driving:

I really thought that Kim Gary has finally opened a branch in Ipoh but something was wrong!

No! It’s SIM Gary!

I couldn’t believe it so I drove around looking for it, and I found the shop in a nearby area:

OMG… It seems that they even imitated the Chinese word design of Kim Gary… Copycats!