Yes, I know I've just had some days off in Japan. Yes, I know I have heaps of work to do. But I was determined to have this long weekend as a long weekend, come hell or high water...

Wednesday 23 -- the pre-holiday evening. We drank to its arrival with a festively rosy "melon drops" (watermelon and soursop juice) from Juiceworks. We visited Pavilion's Tokyo Street (which now looks SO much more familiar...), and got ready for the holiday by treating ourselves to some hojicha, and raiding Daiso for replacement drinking glasses.

And we watched The Peanuts Movie, which was delightful.

Full 14 years ago, we visited the Snoopy Gallery, forerunner to today's Charles M. Schulz Museum, in Santa Rosa, California.



My thoughts at the time:

"I still very much appreciate Snoopy, and they are in the midst of building a big Schultz museum. So why did I get the feeling of somehow being in a time warp -- that the world had passed us by, there were only a few of us left? Is it just that the creator of these figures is dead? Or is it that today's kids have other cartoon heroes? We sat a little while having coffee and ice-creams in the cafe overlooking the ice rink, watching skaters large and small, proficient and not so, tracing circles. Snoopy comes and skates on Sundays, apparently."

So it's awesome that Charlie Brown and Snoopy now have their own movie, and that Malaysians large and small were finding them funny and heart-warming.

Thursday 24 -- the Prophet's Birthday holiday, and Christmas Eve. We walked to the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, and sat for a while, cooling off with a can of iced coffee from the little store. We revisited the Tugu Negara, one of the first things I saw on my first visit to KL in 2005. And we walked out via the lake, listening to the bird song, admiring the tree house, and watching the families gathering to picnic.









At Nu Central we visited the Korea Rail Network Authority's publicity booth. They're bidding for the KL-Singapore high-speed rail link. As, of course, are China and Japan...



We had lunch at Sin Kee, a venerable old Chinese place in Brickfields, busy as on this holiday lunchtime. Our ginger chicken rice and sweet-sour pork rice were very acceptable. But I felt a bit Charlie Brown-esque, as I totally failed to acquire what they're really famous for. Never mind. Next time...

Friday 25 -- Christmas Day. We went to the service at the lovely St Mary's Cathedral. And we had lunch at The Betel Leaf, a delightful Indian restaurant on Lebuh Ampang. Just enough room left at tea-time for the Genoa cake we bought a couple of weeks ago.

Saturday 26 -- Boxing Day. Quintessential Malay food at Sarina's, Sogo -- beef rendang, squid sambal, kuih, and sock-made coffee. Then Mud! The musical, that is, which in an hour's song and dance tries to introduce visitors to the origins of KL. You can't pack too much into an hour, especially when you have audience participation to fit in too, but we covered the early tin-mining settlement, which drew a stream of migrants (some more hopeful than informed), the arrival of Yap Ah Loy, life in the nearby kampungs, the fire, the flood, and the rebuilding.



The theatre itself is worth visiting, too:



Over the Christmas break I've been reading The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan. The aim of the book is to put history's centre of gravity back where it belongs -- in the east. This is hardly a new idea, but you can't help be exhilarated by the sheer scope of this book. Across thousands of miles and thousands of years, hordes of adventurers, traders, soldiers, and idealists surge backwards and forwards over the landmasses and seas linking Asia with the rest of the world. It's mesmerizing. Everyone wanted -- and wants -- a piece of the riches of the east...

And the book has somehow got into the rest of Christmas... Would you believe the term "silk roads" was coined by the uncle of the Snoopy-challenging Red Baron...? ASEAN, bold symbolism notwithstanding, is wondering how to handle the renewed surge of interest in the east, while all the various railway bids demonstrate the rivalrous aspects of the infrastructure-and-connectivity plans afoot at the moment. As the silk roads have long demonstrated, with linkage comes competition (and fear of marginalization). This is no less true today.

Our Christmas lunch had us covering a wide area of culinary influence: Kashmiri pulau (with pineapple, grape, and almonds); gobi manchurian ("deep-fried cauliflower cooked in an Indian-Chinese gravy"); the Betel Leaf's special chicken curry; and "triveni", a drink made of grapes, pineapple, and ginger, which sounds exactly the sort of thing an eastern potentate would have served to beguile a hopeful Mediterranean trader. Our Christmas cake is a descendant of the pandolce genovese, and thus hails from one of the erstwhile city-states that vied with Venice for control of eastern trade. And indeed, celebrating Christmas at St Mary's in Malaysia -- a West Asian religious festival in a West European-headquartered church with an ethnic rainbow of a congregation -- wraps up a thousand journeys all by itself.

And to round off, here's St Mary's, back in December 2005, when I was first on my way to India: