Quiet night…

Gosh! It’s New Year’s Eve today and I still have a backlog of Kuching posts yet to be published.

This was on our last night in Kuching and we had kept that evening free so that my girl would be able to go out with her friends, going back all the way to primary school. The mum went to the mall next door again and she had an early dinner while she was there so I was left to my own devices.

Thinking that I would like to have some rice after so many days, I strolled to The Open Air Market which despite its name, is not a market but a hawker food centre instead, and that other section of the place…

…was open, all ready to roll but I had a change of heart and walked to the other section…

…to see what I could have instead.

The place looked quite pathetic, quite dead with so very few people around, nothing like the way it used to be in its glory days in the 70’s when the customers would spill over onto the road, figuratively speaking, that is…or maybe, everyone was suffering from a hangover after Saturday night.

The steamed paos and siew mai stall was open but I did not feel like having those, not for dinner. Ah Mui, the beef noodles stall, was closed – they do not open on Sundays, I hear…and many of the other stalls were closed too. Maybe they do not open at night, a Sunday night especially.

I asked for  the tomato kway teow from this stall…

…but they were out of kway teow and I settled for the crispy mee (RM4.50)…

…instead. It was nice, just as good as the (more expensive) one I had here the last time I was in the city though it did not look as presentable.

Back in the 70’s, we would frequent one particular kolo mee stall here. We called the fat lady running it, “Gypsy Woman” by virtue of the huge ring earrings that she wore. She was no longer there, of course but this one…

…did seem to attract quite a number of customers so I asked for the big bowl (RM5.00)…

…to see if it was any good. It was all right, nice but not anything that would make me go out of my way for.

I walked sadly back to the hotel that quiet night feeling kind of down and disheartened that all these places that used to bring us so much joy way back in the good ol’ days had turned into pale shadows of what they used to be.

THE OPEN AIR MARKET (1.559021, 110.342409) is located across the road from Electra House along Jalan Power in Kuching.