Today JD was up bright and early to go to the KL Railway Station. I dragged the children out of bed to come along, as I did not want to spend another day in the hotel. They came, most reluctantly, and only with JD helping to coerce them!

Navigating KL roads is a nightmare and predictably we got lost on the way! In fact, we made the same wrong turn we had the first night getting here and then another time we found ourselves on the road to Bangsar Jun had taken us last night! Luckily this highway has a rare U-turn which allowed us to make right our mistake.

Needless to say, by the time we got to the station, JD's nerves were frayed and he was in no mood to negotiate. So we left him and went to the station to get some roti canai (RM5.70 for three, plus ice milo and coffee). Eventually the kids stopped sulking (Alexis before Isabel) so things were a little more relaxed by the time we paid the bill. I even got them some chewing gum.

We wandered through the station with me trying to recreate for them how we had met Granny Pam and Jan Jan here when we put them on the E&O five years ago for Jan's birthday. The girls have no memory of course of driving up that time. We stayed a night then at the Ritz Carlton. They couldn't remember any of this and were barely interested. Eventually, I figured my way out of the station in the right direction of the Central Market. By then it was 11.30 and HOT. But the market is not far away, just north over the Klang River.

We wandered through it, blessing it for the airconditioning. The girls liked the stalls and we ended up buying a bird kite, and a pair of earrings for grandma. Leaving the market we discovered that Jack Neo and Mark Lee were filming in the alley next door. Mark is rake thin and was wearing a long sleeved clinging white tee shirt and bright red pants. Aiyoh. He has a nice easy grace about him but the LOOK! Anyway we stayed for a few minutes, watching with interest this stray kitten which was unfazed by the crowd. Then we headed north to Chinatown.

Didn't make it far cos Alex had a blister on her toe. We ducked into this modest clothing and shoe shop and bought her some very decent sneakers and socks for RM12. JD smsed that he was coming to meet us and, most bizarrely, just as we stepped out of the side door onto the street, he was pulling up to that exact point! Is that weird or what...

More predictably, we got confounded by an unmarked one-way road on the way back to the hotel and ended up heading to Parliament House, so we accompanied JD on a detour to the National Monument, which has a cenotaph dedicated to the war dead and an enormous statue of valiant soldiers, both dead and alive, desperately holding onto the malaysian flag.

It turned out to be a rather pleasant diversion, even though JD was raging a bit. I bought Isabel an ice cream. The monument reminded me of parks I had been to as a young child -- manicured, artificial, almost as though it had been dropped on earth by aliens and the only life left to it was from visits by curious onlookers. It had a real retro feel in that sense.

The noon heat got a bit much after a while. We left and this time, the girls and I took a taxi back to the Equatorial, where we grabbed lunch at the coffee house before Jun and Charles came for us, sans Becky this time.

They took us to the Royal Selangor Pewter Factory, which was a lot of fun. We got to see a bit of how they work the pewter (the production operators each get one little task to do and some of them have been there for years... for example, there is a lady whose job is to hammer the pewter with a small mallet to make a pattern. She has been hammering that pewter, day in and day out for 25 years...) and then we got to make our own bowls at the School of Hard Knocks. Each of us got a small pewter disc on which we chiselled our initials and then we hammered the disc into a bowl using a wooden mould. Isabel hammered her finger, but soldiered on. It was lots of fun. Then we had tea with Datin Chen, whom Jun and Charles and met two weeks ago, before we went back.

JD was at the hotel, driven back by the torrential rain. We had dinner at the bistro.