Trip to KL

Early Monday morning, eight ladies loaded into one of the vans and headed for Kuala Lumpur, about five hours south on the mainland. This is the dorm moms outing to buy groceries and other items for the dorm....and to do some personal shopping while we were at it!!

The drive was gorgeous - lots of beautiful scenery with mountainous areas, caves and green foliage to look at. The highway was three lanes and well built. We stopped at a wonderful rest stop halfway and got Baskins Robbins ice cream and Dunkin Donuts.

KL is a city of over 4 million people with lots of expats. We went downtown first of all to the Ampang Market which caters to Westerners and has a lot of different kinds of item we can't get here in Penang like black licorice, graham wafers, Cool Whip and macaroni and cheese. We loaded up on that stuff and then drove to a suburb called Damansara where the IKEA store is. This shopping area is called the Curve and we stayed at a lovely hotel there. We could afford it because we slept four in a room and we went on a weekday which was much cheaper :)

Once we parked the van, we didn't need to drive again until we left since the hotel had walk ways to all the malls and restaurants. That was great except for the fact that you couldn't take any shopping carts out of the stores. So we had some fairly comical scenes with two or three of us carrying several bags of stuff out of the IKEA store!! We all needed lamps and ended up with six boxes of heavy lamps that we had to drag back to the hotel.

I bought some much needed storage items and shelves for our dorm kitchen and some picture frames for our apartment. We have given our kitchen table to the dorm so all the students can sit down at once to eat. I was hoping to get a new table at IKEA but the one I could afford and that would fit the space wasn't in stock. The best buy of the whole trip was funky wallpaper border for Annie's room in orange and lime green - 35 ft for only RM60 or $17CDN.

The van was packed coming back but I've heard it has been worse on previous trips. The big treat for the dorm kids is the tradition of the dorm moms bringing back Dunkin Donuts for breakfast. I wasn't particularly excited about feeding a lot of trans fats to my students but I guess once a semester isn't going to kill them. And the two dozen donuts I came home with are history this morning!

It was a great trip and I got to know the other ladies a whole lot better. Poor Tim however - he was left here with a couple interesting situations, like a dead rat behind the dorm fridge, and all the responsibility. He had a student home sick yesterday, too. Usually the nurse takes sick dorm kids to her clinic but....she was on the trip with me and the clinic was closed. Tim also missed his day off so I owe him big time!!