Hi everyone, I'm back! This is a bit late, but happy New Year! How was everyone's holidays? The last few weeks of my 2013 were craaazy! Manila → Kuala Lumpur → Manila → Pampanga → Manila → Nueva Ecija and finally, back to Manila on the first day of 2014. Whew! Not sure if I can get used to that kind of life, haha! *hugs bed* Travelling to KL was the beeest though. Probably because it was the place I was most unfamiliar with. I've always wanted to travel, explore the world outside. And by that, I mean be able to explore unfamiliar places, at my own pace. I've traveled a bit before, I've been to Boracay and Cebu and a handful of other places, but all those times I was with family, so I didn't have a lot of freedom to run around and to actually ~get lost~ in the places we went to. One of my life goals has always been that-- to travel, alone, or with one or two close friends. I've always known that I'd go and do it someday, I just didn't know that that someday would happen so soon! That someday just happened to be last year, on December of 2013! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
Early last year, Aian and I talked about attending the annual Comic Fiesta, a much-anticipated ACG event in Malaysia. At first we were only talking about it, but I soon found myself booking a flight to KL and looking up hotel reviews on Agoda.. pretty soon we were boarding the flight to KL. We pretty much just YOLO'd and went ahead with it! I was a bit scared because neither of us have ever stepped outside the country, but when we got there all we did was just go with the flow! Malaysia was a lot like the Philippines.. so much so that when we first got out of the airport, Aian even talked to our taxi drivers in Filipino wtf. But since most Malaysians speak English, we had no trouble getting around. What helped us a lot though, was that on the first day, we met with Mieko, a friend that I met online. She picked us up from the hotel we were temporarily staying in. (Temporarily, because there was a misunderstanding concerning our booking, so we were transferred to a nearby branch of the hotel. Mie helped us out with smoothing things over as well. She even taught us about the train stations and such! So, so thankful!) That day, we were supposed to meet up with Hermes, another friend I met online. I met her after I met Mie, I think! I'm not quite sure, but I do remember seeing photos of Hermes on a mori girl site, and talked about her with Mie. Turns out they were friends, so she introduced us.. I think. Not really sure because that was a long, long time ago, but that's pretty much how the three of us found out about each other. I've only ever talked to them online, so I was so happy to finally meet them both in person! They were both so lovely and we clicked really well! I had a great time with them. Here are some photos!
Quick snap of what I was wearing. I wanted to take advantage of the mirror since we were in that room for only one night lolol.
View of Brickfields / Little India from Mie's car.
Tiny Taipei @ Berjaya Times Square! We all met up and had lunch at this place called Berjaya Times Square. Times Square is a huuuge mall with lots of places to shop in. I almost went crazy just seeing all the clothes! And the Japanese cosmetics! They have Dolly Wink and everything!
There was a huuuge roller coaster inside! You can hear people screaming while walking around lol!
So. Many. Clothes. I didn't want to spend any more on clothes so I had to restrain myself from buying ;___;
Did a quick shoot of Hermes while we were there! We originally planned to do a shoot in a cafe, but weren't able to because of the time constaint, since I insisted that we do purikura on the first day. So instead, I tried doing something similar to Japanese streetsnaps, like the ones in RIDSNAP and DROPTOKYO, but I think I kind of failed with the photos.. I still struggle quite a bit with indoor lighting ;; I did manage to get a few nice ones tho! This is one of them!
Purikuraaa~! This puri made our eyes super huge wtf. It still creeps me out a bit ;;
Huge sparkly Christmas tree in the middle of Times Square + a stolen shot of princess ehehe~
This princess had to leave early because she still had a paper due the next day wtf xD
(You can read her post about this day here!)
Of course, I had to get photos with everyone before princess left!
We left Times Square shortly after, and Mie took us to a place called Publika. Mie says Publika is more artsy compared to other malls in KL, and a lot of people who love cafes and such go there. True enough, there were like three cafes that I wanted to check out.. but I didn't want to spend so much in one day ;; If I were to describe it, it felt a lot like it was the Malaysian version of Power Plant! Mie took us to this cute cafe called Wondermilk, where we had cupcakes and coffee.
Just in front of Wondermilk was this other cute place, called Journal by Plan B. The place was super nice, I really liked the overall theme! I was only able to take a photo of the front (because I wasn't sure if it was allowed) but inside there were shelves as high as the ceiling, all lined with books.
While we were walking around, I was surprised to see this mori girl themed shop. Being a huge fan of mori kei (I still am okay! Even though I don't really dress up in mori kei anymore ;;), I can spot the kanji for 'mori' from far away, so seeing the words 'konnichiwa mori girl' made me squee a little bit! It was surprising to see an actual mori girl themed shop in Malaysia.. In Manila, we have mori girl -ish shops, but not an actual one like this. I think it only shows that Japanese subculture fashion is more accepted in KL than in Manila * ^ * Hopefully in the future, Manila will be more accepting of alternative fashion styles as well!
On the way back to our hotel! Mie took us back in her car. Fun fact: cars in Malaysia have their steering wheels on the right side. I felt pretty disoriented at first. Even their escalators go the opposite way (the ones on the right go down while the ones on the left go up), so I kept going on the wrong one the whole time, haha ;;
Back at the hotel. Mie helped us a lot by talking to the hotel staff, so we were able to check in at the hotel we had originally booked for the trip.
Also, Comic Fiesta passes GET! Thank you x 9999, Mie!
Dinner was sweet and sour fish with rice! And milk tea! Malaysian dishes are way too spicy for me to handle (even just the mildly spicy ones), so Mie told us to look for Chinese food to eat, since they don't use that many spices. We had dinner at a nearby cafeteria that served Chinese, and it was so good! Super cheap, too!
After that, Aian and I got ready for Comic Fiesta, which was the next day. The photos above are of him writing letters to kidchan and VOFAN, ehehe.Aaand that pretty much concludes day one! I wish we'd visited more cafes, there were quite a lot of pretty ones at Publika. Day two in KL was the first day of Comic Fiesta. CF ran for two days, and we attended both, so I think I'll talk about day two and three on the next entry. I have a ton of photos from CF, so please watch out for that!*:･ﾟ✧
