Not-so-feverish rantings and more family

Today I'm finally feeling quite a bit better, after days and days of feverish blur. My mind has been a little lost without a body to take it places, but even my thoughts have tossed and turned as my body took on the ominous charge of killing the millions of viruses that came and stayed like unwanted houseguests. With my inpatience, three days in bed seems like a month, so today I am feeling somewhat cheery that I have been able to do some things.

The ship docked in Port Klang

Now I am left hoping and praying that the vigilance of the inventor and myself was sufficient to keep the germs to ourselves, because many weeks before we had arranged to meet up with my parents on Saturday. They are travelling on a big cruise liner around the world, or, as my father puts it, "going from Brisbane to Sydney on a boat". It's more than 100 days, and the second port of call was Port Klang, the port for Kuala Lumpur, last Saturday. We'd stayed the night in KL, having been there a good part of the previous day sorting out things in the office, so we just did the one hour drive to Port Klang to be there at the pre-arranged meeting time of 10.30am. They were ready and waiting, though not, as I had assumed, to go sightseeing. Their shopping list included shoes for my 80-year-old father and a glasses chain for mother, coffee, beer and a few other essentials. There was also the drama of my mother's tooth, as she had lost a sizeable filling and needed a dentist. The difficulty was compunded by the fact that it was not only a Saturday, it was a public holiday, so I suck my nose into my ailing Galaxy S and started google searching and phoning to no avail. Imagine our surprise and delight when the inventor suddenly pulled the car into a u-turn and suggested, "Let's try this dentist", then our further delight when he wandered back out to the car two minutes later and announced, "He can do a filling right now".

Not the day I was expecting in Port Klang, though we did manage to fit in all the sights I was hoping to visit, as the entire list of things worth seeing, all three of them, were within a few blocks of each other, and there really was little point getting out of the car to look at them. It left us time to fit another saga into what was left of the afternoon- the saga of the ice blended. I'd had a coffee ice blended for breakfast earlier in the morning, and my mother decided she'd like one. She also hadn't eaten lunch, so we pulled into a shopping centre and found a park. The four of us hobbled in, the 80-year old with the injured back, his elderly wife (perhaps the most sprightly of the group), the red-nosed and sniffly inventor, and me limping, my injured knee stirred up from the morning's shopping escapades. The shopping centre eventuated to be smaller than it had promised, and there weren't any specialty drink stores. From the meagre selection of food outlets, though, we did find one with ice blendeds on the menu, so in we went and found a table. Unfortunately, today they weren't serving ice blendeds, in fact, they only had juice or coffee. Up and wandering again, our searching led us to the first floor where we found another place. Yes, they were serving coffee ice blended. Yes, please, she'd like a one, we'd like Tiramisu ice blendeds, and also and a plate of chips. The tiramisu blendeds came first, and the inventor and I had only just put our germy lips to the straws when the waiter reappeared. He was sorry, but the machine had broken and they couldn't make the coffee ice blended. My mother settled for an iced coffee. I hope she managed to find a coffee ice blended in Langkawi, which would be their stop the following day, after sailing through the night. In our hot climate, ice blended is the most refreshing culinary highlight of Malaysia.

The Sultan's Palace, Port Klang. I wouldn't mind living there!

This mosque, which we just happened upon, was far nicer than the dull one that my DK guidebook said was a "must-see".

We enjoyed each other's company despite me using half a tube of antispetic hand wash. It has only been a few weeks since we saw them in Brisbane, but bonus day was a delight, as we probably won't see any family now until Christmas. It was a more relaxed and enjoyable way to see family than having 11 of them come to visit at once! For Christmas we are planning to head back to Brisbane, though our life is so unpredictable and uncertain right now, I will not say we'll definitely be there, even though I have booked the flight. We will all have to wait till later in the year to know about that!

 

We drove home via The Blue Mosque in Shah Alam, a truly beautiful sight in the late-afternoon sun.

 The minarets are said to perhaps be the tallest in the world, and

The mosque is the one of the largest in southeast Asia.