I'm still insanely busy at work. But hey, you have to make time to eat, right?

Firsts this week have included Kader's sukku malli coffee (another of these gloriously spiced South Asian drinks, combining ginger and coriander) and Pau Kee's great take on the classic Ipoh sar hor fun.

We walked home from Pau Kee's little niche at the back of Bukit Bintang. KL is not known for its pedestrian-friendly qualities, but I still enjoy walking here. There's always something interesting to point your camera at.







Changes in the university bus schedule (don't start me...) have necessitated a different transport routine. But the silver lining on Thursdays is that we can have breakfast at various local places in Bukit Bintang. To date we've had chicken porridge one week, and chapattis the next, but there are lots more possibilities in store.

We've been popping into Second Cup for a while now, but until this weekend we hadn't discovered their cupcakes. We were missing out, because they're excellent. They come in interesting flavours such as pandan gula melaka or rose pistachio; you can really taste the pandan and the rose; and they completely avoid that tendency to dryness that afflicts so many cupcakes. Big tick.

Second Cup are at Putra Mall, which we've patronized quite a bit this week, checking out the record-breaking lantern, and also investigating I:Don, which is perhaps our closest source of udon noodles. (Try the lunch set with the foxy kitsune udon, the crispy chicken karaage and the hot green tea. Yum.)

And the MPO gave us another memorable Saturday evening. First up was Shostakovich's Festive Overture (to commemorate the October Revolution, the composer apparently wanted "to convey the feelings of a man who has experienced the hardship of the war years and the enthusiasm of peaceful labour at the construction projects of the new five-year plan", and you can't help wondering if this sentiment and the exuberantly OTT music is all just a little tongue-in-cheek). Then we had another fabulous Malaysian pianist, Mei Yi Foo, playing Beethoven's Concerto No 3 (plus a delightfully syncopated encore, which I would love to track down). And we closed with Rachmaninoff's vibrant Symphony No 3.

Good old KL. When life is grey with work, the city's little pleasures stand out all the more brightly.