Of Pgymy Malls & Rain

Happy happy joy joy...

Only three days left to the very much needed semester break holidays! Oh boy oh boy...

Oh yeah, today was my first ever visit to the new shopping mall in Putrajaya called Alamanda. Makes me wanna say SALAMANDER!

Lizard jokes aside, I'm pretty impressed by the mall. We'll, it's interior anyways. If you want to get a close idea of what Alamanda looks like from the outside, think of a grey-coloured flattened Mid Valley Megamall.

Inside, the place looks like a hybrid of Ikano, 1 Utama 2 (whoa irony), and Twin Towers' KLCC.

The mall itself is only comprised of two floors. The parking's ample enough, going on multiple levels.

We parked on the third level if I'm not mistaken. The third floor of Alamanda to take an escalator down has got a really, really low ceiling. Beware all kwai-los and Shazzes, you've got to really bend down to avoid bumping your heads on the ceiling or also risk getting your head lopped off by those emergency water sprinklers up there.

One feature I loved about the mall is the live Jazz band hired to play there, just like KLCC. They've got a percussionist, a guitarist, a celloist, and a saxophonist (okay, not exactly like KLCC).

I don't want to sound like a stereotypical fool, but I've always known of live Hari Raya songs to be performed by dangdut singers, or these raggedy men with a boring keyboard or the pasar malam-ish blind-man-playing-accordion-yelling-into-microphone types. I'm not a big fan of Hari Raya songs played repeatedly in supermarkets either. No offense to my Muslim friends, yo.

But here's the thing. The Alamanda band played so beautifully, so jazzy, so smoothly, and I almost thought it was Christmas, but they were playing the Selamat Hari Raya song. Wow, that blew me away. That totally changed my perceptions on Hari Raya songs. Forgive me while I indulge in my punk mode: Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuddeeeee!!!!!

*ahem* Moving on, me, my bro, and my mom (they've been to the mall once before) took walks outside to the courtyards to explore the deco. There are those water-spouting fountains like KLCC, but with a nicer view. We didn't get to stay outside for long because strong winds from the oncoming rain were giving us new hairdos and kicking up a lot of dust from sites still under construction.

Back inside I checked out the variety of shops available, which were pretty much standard. There's Starbucks, A&W, Memory Lane, Hush Puppies, Delifrance, F.O.S., Toy City, Carrefour, and the standard food court, among others. There only seems to be one ATM, which is located in the AMFinance small office branch.

There were no pet shops or music (instrument) stores in the mall, which was a bummer (for me).

The crowd mostly comprised of Malays, probably because it was about 6pm then and most of those breaking fast would rather eat out than to cook. Yes, I felt a tad guilty when my family and I devoured our food greedily in KFC at 6:30pm when the rest of the customers, obviously Muslims, were looking at us. It's bad enough that me and my mom's got tan coloured skin, so it looks kinda weird with my brother there who looks totally Chinese and fair.

So after reading magazines from MPH for free, we bummed around for a while longer and then took a film noir-like drive back in the dark and rain to our warm home up in the hill, just in time to watch The Apprentice. Omarosa should be fired.