Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Kuantan for a day.

After much some short planning, I had the opportunity to jalan-jalan in Kuantan. The last time I was there I was with my family, where we stayed overnight at my uncle's place before my registration day in KUSTEM (as you all know, now its known as U-empty UMT).

Started our journey at around 0630/0730 (ohmygosh how did i wake EC up?) and stopped by Hai Peng Kopitiam in Kemamam for some breakfast of toasted buns (way bigger than siew min paos), nasi lemak ikan and coffee. By the way, i find the nasi lemaks and nasi dagangs in Hai Peng bloody (in thick English accent please!) expensive! =/ RM1.50 for that small packet! Argh!

Toasted bun with kaya and butter (RM1 per piece). The bun is delicious! Not the kaya though, i still prefer kaya in the siew min pao in KT.


Expensive nasi lemak ikan: RM1.50 for this small portion. =/

Left Kemaman and continued our journey to Kuantan which was another one (or was it 2) hour away. Upon reaching the city, we quickly look for signs of shopping malls, which was actually our my main purpose of going to Kuantan. After seeing the signboard giving directions to the East Coast Mall, we headed towards the direction, which lead us to a traffic light. And guess what?

East Coast Mall was on the left while Berjaya Megamall (under the Berjaya group) was on the right.

Uh-oh.

However, we quickly decided to go to the East Coast Mall, since it was still new (and some parts were still under construction) and it was damn new til they haven't started to charge any parking fees yet! Woo-hoo!

looking at Berjaya Megamall from the East Coast Mall's level 4 parking



I was so excited upon entering the vicinity of the mall and screamed when I saw:

Starbucks! =D How i miss you~

EC to chose to park and one of the levels since he didn't want to jemur his car under the sun (and hey, it's freeleh..). After coming down the escalator, something else made me shrieked!

Raja Sushi (Sushi King)!

Haha.. I know that i sound like a jakun or whatever you term as people who have never see things (no offense to the jakuns, please) but it was a great to be away from the same buildings, cars, roads etc that I've been looking at for a few months!

Here are some more shots in East Coast Mall, as you can see there weren't many people around. I believe that it's due to the fact that it's quite new, and it was also a working day.











Haha..what a funny photo!

After around half an hour of walking, we kind of got bored of the mall since it was really quiet and there weren't many people around so we chose to jump over to Berjaya Megamall since it's looks nice from the outside.





EC had to take this photo! He was excited seeing the initials for his school being used by a boOkstore! *sweats*

We had lunch in Kenny Roger's! Wheeeee!~ I miss having its roasted black pepper chicken with variety of side dishes! At times i prefer Kenny Roger's over Nando's since the former's roasted chicken has more flavour and more side dishes to choose from! However, i love Nando's Peri Chips and Garlic Sauce too! =D

my beef bolognese spaghetti with quarter chicken with tomato and cucumber salad as side dish (the downside of this set is that you get to only pick ONE side dish, and no muffin)! Love it love it! The chicken was tender and juicy, better than EC's order of black pepper quarter chicken. Hohohoho!


EC's dry black pepper quarter chicken with 3 side dishes: pasta salad, potato salad, and macaroni and cheese


it had been a while since we last took some photos of food, so pardon the excitement!


two other happy eaters and travellers, excited to be able to leave the land of the turtles for at least a day


muffins!

After the satisfying lunch, we headed to Popular bookstore since I wanted to get some foolscap papers and trying to look for Feli's and Yng Jiun's CDs only to have found:

Orange Range's ORANGE CD! Was so tempted to buy but I didn't want to purchase the Taiwan-imported one. Plus, this CD is the compilation of their singles so I'm still thinking whether it is worth buying, same goes to RANGE.

After shopping a little in Cold Storage, we decide to head back to the East Coast Mall for some reasons, although we did not venture into other levels of Berjaya Megamall. I guess we weren't feeling THAT adventerous.

Bought some donuts from

Big Apple Donuts and Coffee! =D Selene approves!

and headed over to Starbucks for some chit chat and coffee. And also there was an incident involving coffee beans, which had us receiving a small paper cup of roasted coffee beans (still on the dining table at my place here!) but I'm too lazy to tell the story now. Or ever. Haha.

Free コヒ(pronounced as ko-hi, which is the Katakana writing for coffee in Japanese) beans!


my Iced Caramel Macchiato!

Our day in Kuantan ended with us driving back at around 1730 hours. We stopped by Kemaman for some seafood for dinner. The row of shoplots that we chose has four different seafood restaurants serving stuffed crabs, so we took a while to discuss which one was to be our target.

yang mana satu menjadi pilihan?

In the end, we chose to go to somewhere which had the most people at that time, which sported the word KEMAMAN outside on its signboard. However, upon entering the restaurant, i found the proper name:






We ordered two baked stuffed crabs, bittergourd soup, ginger stir fry lala, buttered prawns and fried veges (can't remember what veges, must have been either kangkung or yam leaves). The dish that really made our day was not the crabs, but the buttered prawns instead!

huge juicy prawn!

I know some of you might go, "Eh! That is NOT buttered prawn! Where are the butter crumbs (or whatever you call that yellow-crunchy thingies)?!"

It is! That is what Alex ordered anyways. The prawn was huge, and sssssooooo sweet that it made me high for a while. And it tasted really good when you eat it with the bits of curry leaves laced with burnt/fried/whatever-butter-paste! About the stuffed crabs, they were just normal but the chilli sauce that was served with it was goOd too! And it complemented the crabmeat well, so no complaints there.






I didn't manage forgot to take some pictures of the other 3 dishes. =P But oh god, the bittergourd soup was the bitterest-est bittergourd soup i've drank my whole life! O_o The lala dish was just normal, but EC was quite happy that they (the aunties who we saw cooking in the kitchen) actually took the time to separate the top shell from the bottom shell, so we could enjoy more meat! =D Should have ordered chillied lalas though, the gingered ones not enough tendangan kick! =P

Unfortunately, we had to spent around RM96 for the dinner, which I thought was quite expensive. And it didnt help that one of the previous nights my cousin was telling me that 6 dishes in a seafood restaurant where UUM students frequently go cost RM100! =O The stuffed crabs were RM7 each, and same goes for the prawns.

Nevermindla, not always get to eat seafood.

We reached home around 11pm that night, only to have somemore stuffed crabs for supper! Haha..

And that was how my 1-day-after-Deepavali Kuantan trip went.

=)

*some of the photos were taken from Sang Chee's phone.

5 comments:

  1. darn! i totally missed the trip. :(

    ReplyDelete
  2. silveraven: Awww.. next time we all should go on a trip together! Must find a time before we all graduate then! Can can? =D

    ReplyDelete
  3. ween..

    EC also stands for East Cost mall!

    yay! boleh ajak EC pegi EC always la!
    hehehe.

    waaaa at last,u feel like in KL kan?only it didnt have me je.hehe!

    ReplyDelete
  4. aimihayy: That is so true! Wakakakaka.. feels a bit jer like KL, KL lagi banyak tempat!

    ReplyDelete
  5. WOW. so many food pictures! XD EAST COST MALL reminds me of GIANT. Berjaya Megamall better! Cus got Big Apple Donuts and Coffee and also Kenny Roger's and Nando's. XD The prawns looks yummy though. ;P

    ReplyDelete

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