Kathmandu

Got back from Kathmandu, Nepal last night. Nestled in the Himalayas, a couple hundred kilometers from Mt. Everest. Its a valley in the mountains, but still at an elevation of about a mile and a 1/2 above sea level. It was hot and humid, and the air was very dusty.
In some ways Kathmandu is like India, crowded and dirty, piles of garbage all around, stray dogs, and lots of honking of horns. The streets are better organized, though, there are no auto rickshaws, and there are sidewalks and street lights. A greater portion of the Nepalese dress western, but there are still lots of sarees around.
Kathmandu fun fact: the work/school week is 6 days. Only Saturday is the weekend. But, according to our sherpa/guide (who I'll talk about in later posts), they only work 5 or 6 hours a day.

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A.H.W.O.S.G.

This really has nothing to do with India. But neither did my Kuala Lumpur posts, did they? Anyway, just finished A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. I know, I'm about 7 years late, but if you haven't read it you really need to. For someone my age, its a pretty amazing time capsule of stumbling through your twenties in the 90's. It hits on lots of important social events of our 20somethings, like early Vince Vaughn career to how gross Puck on Real World San Francisco is. And, its very postmodern, regularly breaking the 4th wall with characters breaking out of character and recognizing they are out of character, to dialog mentioning they are in a book, and all sorts of other clever devices. And I mean clever in the best way possible, not the Fight Club sort of clever. There are moments when he is panicking in the book that read like a stream of consciousness, and parts where he schizophrenically hops from the reality of the moment to where his mind is and back and forth and back again.
Its a fascinating read, well deserving of its Pulitzer nomination, and I highly recommend.

My new Bullet

My new Royal Enfield Bullet finally arrived today. What. Up.

All motorcycles here are 150cc, except the Royal Enfield's. They make a 350cc and a 500cc. And Royal Enfield hasn't materially changed the style of their bikes since around WWII, as evidenced by the photo. The big new advancement for the 2008 model year was they switched the transmission over to the left foot like every other bike in the world. I ordered my 2009 from the dealership a couple weeks ago, and it actually arrived ahead of schedule, and was delivered on the same day I registered it. This sort of timeliness is very rare for India and was quite shocking.

Birthday Celebration

I'd been saving this bottle of premium import for a special occasion. BTW, its an optical illusion, the beer bottle is not actually larger than Shogun.

Partying Pirate Style

Here is a short video of a pirate themed bar in Koramongala. The video is necessary to capture the booming club volume Michael Jackson being blasted through the place at three in the afternoon.

Harima

So, I found out about a Japanese restaurant in Bangalore city center last week (turns out it is THE only Japanese restaurant in Karnataka), so went there for lunch on Sunday. Its called Harima, and its on the 4th floor of a totally shitty building along a busy N/S thoroughfare called Residency road. Its quite lovely inside, very Japanese. The mistake I made was going so soon after having awesome sushi in Kuala Lumpur. They had Asahi beer. Its the first place I've been to, including swank places like Lila Palace, that have any other beer except Kingfisher, Budweiser, or rarely Carlsburg. But they were proud of it at 400 INR per small beer. They also had sake, also very expensive for 150ml pour ( I think 800 INR?). There was no sushi bar, and the sushi menu was very limited. The day I went, they had tuna, salmon, and eel. That's it. It was also very expensive. It was 800 INR for two small pieces of eel sushi, for example. The quality was not great. It wasn't particularly cold, and they cut the tuna incorrectly against the grain of the fish so it looked ugly. The wasabi was very low quality, very doughy and not hot at all. And the ginger was a very dark brown (so off color I did not even think about trying it). Half the restaurant is floor seating on a mat, half normal chair seating. I ended up racking up an 4100 lunch tab for just myself, which is an astronomical amount of money for food here. My groceries for a month at the nicest grocery store in the nicest part of town (see Spar post earlier) are less than that.
I didn't get sick from the meal, which is good. But I wont be going back. If I get the DTs for sushi in the future I will get on a plane for a night in Singapore.

A couple more pics of KL

Hidden on my other camera. BTW, the pics all look soft from Kuala Lumpur because of the dense humidity. The air was that thick.

New release this week!

Dining in Kuala Lumpur

Last night I went to a fine dining Italian place. Had a 5 course tasting menu from a guest chef from Sicily. Had a bottle of 93 Chateau Labegorce from Margaux. The food was okay, not amazing. There was just a little something wrong with each course. Good effort though.
Tonight after the concert I went to frangipani, a fine dining french restaurant on one of the main drags. The wine list was very large and quite complete, but crazy overpriced. Settled on a bottle of 91 Larrivet Haut Brion, which is like a $100 bottle of wine in the US, for the ringgit equiv of $300 bucks. Had a 4 course tasting menu. Food was fantastic. Not brave new world stuff like Margaux in Berlin, just really great classic French cuisine. Had a glass of '73 calvados with dessert. Tasty.
When I was sat the matrodie was up front about how he had to seat me next to a large party. I said it was fine. It was a 20 top of Austrian dudes and Malaysian chicks. And they were pouring Chateau Lafite Rothschild as the table wine!! And remember, the shit is like 400% markup from normal price too. Crazy. Granted, most of the chicks weren't drinking the wine, but still. The poor bastard with that bill.
There was a club upstairs from the restaurant. Went there after dinner. Pounding house music, scantily clad Malaysian chicks, and this nasty apple and scotch martini drink everyone was drinking.

Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra

A couple shitty blackberry pics of the concert hall. Its in one of the Petronas twin towers. The concert was really amazing. Particularly the second part of the program. It was Eduard Lalo's Symphonie espagnole. The violin soloist was this chinese dude Chuanyun Li. He's "famous" for the symphonie espanole because shortly after his graduation from Julliard he stepped in with 5 days notice and played the piece with some big orchestra. He's one of the greatest classical musicians I've ever gotten to see. He's kind of a fat dude, and stands there and belts out the piece, sweating and walking around while playing. At the completion of the piece, the audience (who were a really great philharmonic audience, knew when to clap and when not, were very quiet, everyone dressed to the nines) went fucking crazy. He did the obligatory walk off the stage and back on, got presented the bouquet, walked back off, back on, and the audience wouldn't stop. They cheered and clapped for about 20 minutes, and after a while the Malaysian symphony orchestra that accompanied his solo stopped with their polite tapping of bowstrings on instruments and joined in the riotous applause. Li finally came back on stage and in broken english said he would like to play a piece from some movie score he's working on. He proceeded to play unaccompanied the craziest violin piece I've ever heard, the violin section was going crazy. After about 5 minutes his bow literally broke over the violin, not the horsehair but the bow itself. Everyone gasped and then erupted into applause. It was crazy. People were crying. Not me though, I don't cry.
Apparently this dude has a bunch of cds. If you've any interest in classic music, I highly recommend you check him out.

Kuala Lumpur day one

Kuala Lumpur is pretty awesome. Its very modern, everything is spotless, a monorail that runs through the city, great all around. Its pretty hot, not crazy hot, but maybe like 90F. But very, very humid. So humid the lens of my camera fogged up constantly outside. I was going to spend an hour or so this morning teasing and feathering my hair but I'm sure glad I didn't as it would have instantly lost all of its body and fell limp.
Its a muslim country, and there is certainly evidence of that; signs to the prayer rooms in public places, maybe about 1/2 the women wear their head covered in a Hijab. But they aren't too hardcore, I've only seen a few Burqas, and you can drink in restaurants outside of hotels.
The people are okay looking. Didn't see anyone strikingly attractive though. A lot more white people than in India, but still not too many. At least 1/2 the people wear corrective lens eye glasses. Probably closer to 2/3. Bad eyes in the genes in Malaysia, I guess.
I went to Transformers 2 at the theater under twin towers. The multiplex of 10 theaters was entirely devoted to Transformers 2, and it was entirely sold out at 4pm on a weekday. My god this movie is going to make a ridiculous amount of money internationally. The theater was very nice, on par with the Arclight; assigned seats, spacious, clean theater, big screen, great digital sound. There were Malaysian subtitles. The audience was pretty good. One pair of women yapped through the whole thing, but it wasn't too distracting as there is an explosion about every 12 seconds in the movie. And, a few cell phone texters, but not too egregious.
The movie is the cinematic equivalent of the "doing lines of coke off of a hooker's ass" cliche. Its completely reckless excess with no thought for the outcome or the consequences. Its loud and dumb and long and filled with mistakes. But I kinda liked it. And Megan Fox is a treasure of the modern day. I would be totally fine if a law was passed that there must be a slow-mo shot of Megan Fox out-running an explosion in every movie produced. It would be a better world, my friends. Trust me on this one.

Mall at the Twin Towers

The Blessing of Allah on you, Kuala Lumpur, for this gift of Starbucks...





Some pics of the mall that surrounds the Petronas twin towers. Very upscale, Tiffany and Co, Tod's, Prada, the works. Had some sushi at a Japanese restaurant on the top floor. Very good.

Room at the Imperial Hotel

Very nice hotel. A real bed will be a nice change of pace from the mat I am slowly growing accustomed to sleeping on. And hot water will also be a fun blast from the past.

On the ground in KL

Just got into Kuala Lumpur. Flew Malaysia Air on the red eye through Chennai. The plane was kind of shitty, not modern international business class seats, the old school non layflat kind. The KL airport is sweet, just a few years old and at the cost of $2billion US, and consider too the weak ringgit (5 star hotel I'm going to is $150 a night). On the high speed train into the city, staying next to the petronas twin towers, which up to a few years ago were the tallest buildings in the world.

Angels and Demons

Went to a movie for the first time. Theater is about an hour and a half away in central Bangalore. Its just the one screen, and they are playing Angels and Demons. The ticket is 100 rupees (about 2 bucks). I went to the 1:45pm show, it was sold out. The audience was incredibly rude, like nothing I've ever seen. They talked to each other, talked on their mobile phones, sent text messages, and basically ignored the movie through the whole thing. I'm not even sure why they bothered coming. The screen was pretty small for a very large auditorium, but the projection quality was good, and the bulb was fully lit. The sound was digital and surround, and when you could hear it over everyone talking (mostly when something blew up), it was well balanced.
The theater was "air conditioned", but I think it was more air coolers, or what are sometimes called swamp coolers, because the air conditioning too was very loud. Kinda like the sound when you walk into a walk in fridge in a restaurant kitchen, for anyone with that experience. "Woooosh" on and off through the whole movie. There weren't any house lights to speak of, or running lights during the movie, so, save for the glow of dozens and dozens of cell phones, it was pitch black. So, the ushers would walk people back to their seats with a big flashlight, hollering at the top of their lungs over the sound of the movie and of all of the audience talking to each other.
The seats are very small, with very low backs, and metal. For the Angeleno readers, the seats are quite a bit worse than the New Beverly, however unbelievable that sounds.

It was not a great movie experience.