Get down to it…

I was grumbling on Facebook that I had run out of Bovril and there wasn’t any stock in town. Eventually, friends started telling me that they managed to buy it at the supermarket here and it is also available in the one in the kampung area but I had been avoiding both since they appeared quite regularly in the daily list of places visited by COVID-19 positive cases and one was so nice as to PM me saying that he saw people unloading the newly-arrived stock at a shop here and that one was never in the list. Unfortunately, that shop is in a high risk area that I have been avoiding for a long time. Why, I was even thinking of purchasing it online!

Well, one day led to another and with Hari Raya coming up, I had no choice but to venture to the supermarket that stocks up on all the nice imported stuff last Saturday morning to buy some gifts for my cousin and his family who will be celebrating this auspicious occasion and I decided to get down to buying a bottle of Bovril while I was there.

I managed to grab, not one but TWO bottles…

…of what I had been waiting to lay my hands on all this time.

This is the real beef variety…

…unlike the regular ones so of course, it did not come cheap…

It looks like it will not be due for expiry till the end of May, 2022…

…and not the 22nd of May. I guess it will not last that long especially when they are rather small, those two bottles and there was only one size at the supermarket that day.

Gosh!!! It was so crowded that morning! Yes, they insisted that everyone followed the SOPs when entering and when paying at the cashiers’ counters, but inside, it was a free-for-all. The place was not big and they placed all those boxes of stuff for sale along the narrow alleys leaving enough space for one person to walk through on either side of the boxes…but there were some shoppers taking their sweet time looking at everything on the shelves, taking them down to have a closer look one by one and worse, some just stood there and talked and talked and talked, so inconsiderate.

I wasted no time at all in simply grabbing a few things I thought my cousin and his family might like – dates, the ones still on the stalks and those with honey, Kjeldsens’ butter cookies, Ferrero Rocher – the white ones…and ran out of the place as soon as I could.

Some people did tell me that I should not go there on weekends, best to go in the middle of some very hot weekday afternoon when many are working and the rest would not venture out in the heat.

TA KIONG EMPORIUM (2.2933,111.82713,783) is located at No. 42-46, Jalan Tuanku Osman.