End Of Message.

Today, I did just that.

You know those towers belonging to the old Moorish railway station along Jalan Sultan Hishamuddin?

Well, I got to the top and possibly, be the first blogger to do so.

I walked and saw this:

It was irresistible. So, I checked the entrance to see if I could go up:

Grilled!

Aww… It’s locked!

I could climb the facade but that didn’t sound like a good idea. So, feeling disappointed, I had to check out the bottom inside of the tower just to see if there was any other way in.

I was doubly disappointed to find out that the tower has become a storage room for janitors. Such historical building deserves more respect that it receives at the moment.

Wait a minute! What is that?

Holy cow! A key! This must be my lucky day!

The next moment, I found myself inside:

What a mess. But that did not stop me from going up.

At that top:

Talk about maintenance…

Realizing how privileged was I to get up here, I spent close to 30 minutes enjoying the view and occasionally waving to the people down below. They probably thought, how the hell did he get up there? Or, why is that nut waving at me?

I said to myself, hey, this is Metblogs KL stuff!

Cool! I am going to try to get to the top of another tower of the station next week!

p/s – actually, I did not break in. The key didn’t work. And so, I asked for a sweet janitor for the key. Moral of the day: ask if you need something. Don’t break in.

Nagas is a restaurant serving Indian food. Not the posh kind but a few notches above typical Indian restaurant. I like the atmosphere, except, maybe, it is right beside the busy Tun Sambanthan and whenever a huge vehicle passes, a bus for instance, the ground shakes. But with good company, nobody would care about that minor nuisance.

More about Nagas from The Star:

When Nagaragen R. Pillay set up his business in Brickfields about a year ago, he initially wanted to open only one Indian restaurant on a 1,765 sq m area.

“But when I came to plan the renovations, I saw the potential and decided to split the area into three restaurants with different concepts,” he said.

Nagas is divided into the Nagas Self-Service, Nagas Cafe and Nagas Fine-Dining.

Nagas Self-Service serves Malaysian Indian food on a self-service basis while Nagas Fine-Dining caters to private functions.

Nagas Cafe, which will serve burgers, hotdogs, pizzas, pasta and Western food, is not yet open.

“We serve curry dishes, our speciality chicken briyani, tandoori chicken and bread dishes at the 24-hour Nagas Self-Service.

“We cook our briyani rice with the chicken and the tandoori chicken is prepared by cooks from West Bengal who specialise in tandoori cooking.

“We also have South Indian cooks who make roti canai, tosai and speciality dish Chicken Tosai.”

Nagas is located at a t-junction with the main street being Tun Sambanthan and some less used road going somewhere that I don’t know. But across the I-don’t-know street is a restaurant called the Pine. According to a friend, whom is 70 this week, The Pine was the place where everybody wanted to go and have dinner. The prawns were delicious and the mutton soup was oh-la-la!

Back probably in the 60s or the 70s, there was nothing on Brickfields, except the Pine. Another friend reminisced how the cooks of the Pine would boil live prawns into a pot of water. I found that disturbing, really, but by judging his expression, The Pine must have had some kind of reputation. But that was years ago. And yeah, I hang around old people. Tsk, tsk, tsk…

Nowadays, the Pine looks dead.

Today of course, Brickfields is full of Indian restaurants. After all, what would Little Indian be without Indian food?

But Brickfields is undergoing rapid transformation given the development effort being carried out under the KL Sentral initiative. But I wonder how it would be like if the Pine had continued to operate the way it did long ago. I am sure Tun Sambanthan, already offering horrendous driving experience, would be impassible.

Sometimes, conversation among friends would drag for hours. We met at around 1930 and at one time, I realized that it was already 2200! A bit sleepy and we all wanted to go home, or somewhere else, if you know what I mean.

But anytway, another interesting tidbit: old folks play Bingo every Tuesday’s night (or is it Thursday?) at a community hall behind The Pine.

A game of Bingo, anybody?

My opinion?

No, no, no. Not Emmy Rossum. The SMART Tunnel!

It looks boring from the inside. Yeah, yeah. The first of its kind they say. All that smart systems that are expected to mitigate flood problem in KL, blah, blah, blah. I can’t see them. So, boring…

After all, what would you expect from a tunnel constructed with a tunnel BORING machine? Have you ever thought of that?

Bah!

The ride is not as smooth as the road above.

The ceiling looks low and I am sure those with claustrophobia would scream, momma, get me out please!

Not to forget, too long a tunnel. Feeling bored driving in a tunnel, a little voice in my head said, are we there yet? Are we there yet? ARE WE THERE YET?

What is the cost of the tunnel again?

But many it did not feel convenience allegedly offered by the tunnel because I did not have to suffer the insufferable traffic congestion in the morning. Later today, during rush hour, maybe I would come to appreciate Samy Vellu’s baby better.

Hah! Let’s see if the tunnel really helps in fighting flood! (Knock on wood)

Anyway, you might want to watch a video of a ride into and out of the tunnel, showing a terrorist inspecting the tunnel. OMG! Arrest him.

The park looked smaller than what I had in mind. Back in the 1990s, especially the early 1990s, to me, the park stretched from the Tugu Negara and the Parliament, passed through the railways station and the national mosque and then went endlessly with no boundary. This was probably because the park had no extensive concrete pathways. And its lakes was so huge to me that it seemed like a huge sea inland, possibly something close to Lake Michigan.

Exaggeration? Yes but that what the lake garden was to me when I was small.

At some point, I stopped paying homage to the lake garden while other things started to occupy my time. “Modern” activities such as building a civilization on my computer crowded out my nascent love for nature. Despite that, the memory lingered in me. The perception of wild great jungle impressed so much on me that until yesterday’s visit, that was the very perception that I held.

As I grew up, that perception became increasingly illogical, upon knowing and seeing how Kuala Lumpur rapidly asserted itself through the roaring nineties, becoming from just another city to, perhaps, a metropolitan of impressive skyscrapers. That growth had converted and is still converting green jungle into gray jungle. News on it is everywhere for those that care. The struggle to preserve whatever left out there could be loudly heard at Kota Damansara or even closer to my home, Ampang.

Yesterday, I wandered around Damansara, visting the much hyped The Curve and other malls that packed the area. After bowling and “tonight, we dine in hell”, I was on my way to the lake garden and on the way, I passed through a tunnel of the Penchala Link. The area surrounding the tunnel looked like a real jungle. Curious, I looked it up on Google Maps. That little investigation somewhat confirms my suspicion that it is a large area covered by trees:

Compare that to the lake garden, my perception of the lake garden mocked the area around the Penchala Link:

Trivia: try to spot the Malaysian Nature Society’s HQ!

Still, yesterday’s excursion to the lake garden took my almost 2 hours; it started around 6PM and ended when the sun was setting near 8PM; from the Tugu Negara, I walked all the way to the Muzium Negara and then back again. Now I know where is the other end of the park.

By the time I got home, I could not feel my legs anymore. My feet gave way to my weight. And so too my childhood perception of the lake garden. For me, it is finally a true, overdue end of an era.