Open air…

That day, my friend, Philip, and I headed to the city centre in his rented car but before we went to check into the hotel, we stopped by here…

…right across the road from this shopping complex…

…which was THE place to shop in the 70’s but these days, it has been overshadowed by all the huge malls here, there and everywhere in the city.

This hawker centre was closed down for a while for renovations but when we stepped into the place that day, I did not think it looked any different from before…

In my younger days, we would drop by here to enjoy some of the nice stuff that they sold here and one of the must-eat in those days would be the sio bee (meat dumplings)…

…from this stall…

…which is still going strong. Many will still drop by to enjoy those sio bee and also the paos…

…and order their soya bean milk to wash everything down and one of them would be my friend, Philip, who loves the sio bee a lot and also their char siew pao…

In fact, before we left Kuching, he made it a point to stop by this place again to grab hold of some to take home. I tried the char siew pao and I actually liked it very much – nicer than any we can get in Sibu…but I did not feel like buying any back. Philip bought a big pao…

…for me to try and I found it to be really nice too…

In fact, I would think everything is much nicer than at that one other place in the city that, for some reason or other, is so so very popular to this day – I will be blogging about that one soon. Having tried both varieties of the pao here, on my part, I think that between the two, the char siew pao is nicer.

We also had the jiew hu eng chai/sotong kangkong (cuttlefish & water spinach)…

…but though it was all right, I did not think it was as great as I remembered it to be.

I used to love the beef noodles here too…

…but even if the stall was open, I would not have ordered as that last time I had it here, it did not seem to be as nice as before, not anymore and because of that, I never came back again.

After that pit stop, we went to check into our hotel…

No, no…we did not stay at this one – I, for one, will not be able to afford it. That was just the view from the hotel where we were staying where the room…

…though small…

…was nice and clean and comfortable…

Actually Philip booked two single rooms with single beds (RM49.99 nett each, all inclusive unlike that one where you would have to pay extra for electricity, towel, soap and so on and so forth) but when we went to our respective rooms, I found that the power in mine refused to come on despite my inserting their sensor card into the slot. I went to the reception counter to lodge a complaint and they upgraded me to this bigger one with a queen-sized bed (RM108.00 nett) at no extra charge. Ain’t that nice?

The service was excellent and the staff was extra helpful and friendly. With its ideal location, I certainly wouldn’t mind staying here again the next time I come to town.