Leaving Thomson GrassValley

Today is officially my last day here. I'm taking 2 weeks off before starting a new career at kl sentral. I thought leaving would be easy but turns out, it's far from it. It's difficult.

Coffee mug, say goodbye to the twins :-(

Quoting Brian Tracy, "To be the best, you need to be prepared to climb peak to peak. You must be prepared to start all over again from the bottom, once you've reached the top". I hope he's right

Primeval

There's a man-eating crocodile in the river of Ruzizi, and his name is Gustave. After the death of a UN volunteer, news producer Tim Manfrey and his team was despatched to civil-war zone Burundi to capture the beast and report the story, but first, they have to stay alive. This movie is based on true events, and Gustave is still at large until today.

I've always love monsters movie. You can always anticipate the plot and the monster will usually attack when the background music change. If you love "Lake Placid" or "Anaconda", you'll love this movie. I did some 'google'ing and found some interesting facts about Gustave. In the movie, Gustave is big and scary and incredibly fast but in real life, Gustave is actually much slower. Patrice Faye, a Frenchman who has lived in Burundi for about 20 years and has a keen interest in animals says this, "He is enormous. He is three times as big as the other crocodiles in Burundi. He is not very fast and cannot feed on what other crocodiles in Burundi eat - fish and small mammals. He attacks slow prey which are easy to capture.". According to Faye, Gustave is 20 feet long, weighs one ton, and is 60 years old. "One year, I followed the path he took on one of his forays and 17 people had been eaten between Kanyosha and Minago, and Kabezi and Magara." How's that for a scary thought?

Genre: Monster
Story line: 2/5
Visual: 2/5
Audio: 5/5
Acting: 2/5

The Pursuit of Happyness

This movie tells the story of Chris Gardner, a struggling single parent with a son. Chris earns his living selling the little needed medical bone density scanners. His wife left when the pressure of working double shift and catering for their family needs became too much to bare. Together, father and son struggle through homelessness, jail time, tax seizure and the punishing despair to find happiness.

This movie is amazing. It's based on a true story with in-your-face reality of life. Audience will feel how it felt like being poor. How hard it is to make a living. I can easily relate how hard it is trying to sell a luxury item but at the same time, trying to keep cool of the fact that your very survival relies on the money from the sales.

Genre: Drama
Story line: 5/5
Visual: 5/5
Audio: 5/5
Acting: 5/5

ps: Be kind to your MLM salesperson. If they are rude to you, it's not really them. It's the desperation that's talking. Cut them some slack, please.

Eye On Malaysia @Tasik Titiwangsa

Went to the 'Eye On Malaysia' which is located at Tasik Titiwangsa. Stroke of luck, we didn't have to queue that long to get a ticket. The 'Eye On Malaysia' at 60 meters, is a giant ferris wheel and equipt with 42 gondollas. Each gondolla can fit 8 people but if there's not that many crowd, they would let in about 6 people per gondolla. Tickets are priced at RM15 for adult and RM8 for kids for a 12 minute ride. Preferably, try it at night time to have the best night view of KL. It's open until midnight during weekends.

The wheel looks like the fan on an airplane
It's a party around here
The gondollas is a bit small compared to the Eye of London
50 meters above sea level

Surfing @ Sunway Lagoon

This time, I'm trying my hand at surfing and body boarding. I found out that during the monsoon season on the east coast, people actually surf there. Occasionally. the waves there are comparable to Bali and Hawaii. Since I have not surf a single wave all my live before, I decided to try it out first at Sunway Lagoon's Surf Pool.

Ok, here's the breakdown of the price

Entrance to Sunway Wet Park : RM 27.90
Rental of Body board : RM 10.00, refundable deposit of RM 20.00
Rental of Surf board : RM 20.00, refundable deposit of RM 30.00

The surf pool is only open during weekends and public holidays. Session for body boarding is from 3.00pm to 4.00pm and limited to 20 person per session. While for surfing is from 5.00pm to 6.00pm. For surfing, you need to register first at the rental booth at 3.30pm because there's a limit of 12 person per session and this quota is usually filled by regular surfers, so be quick. In each session, you'd be given about 20 waves which will be signalled with a loud horn.

Body boarding and surfing is not an easy feat. I can swim, but still find catching the wave a mammoth task. 'Catching' here means having the wave pushing you, while it makes it way to the beach, with you on it. Took me a while to think about the physics but here goes

1. There's a limit to the force of a wave, so if you're too heavy to push, the wave will just duck under you. To prevent this, you need to lessen the force needed to push you by moving at a similar speed as the wave. To do this, you need to paddle in the same direction as the wave is going. In bodyboarding, you can paddle with your hands and feet but with surfing, you can only to paddle with your hands.

2. Next, comes the hard part. Duck diving. When the wave is approximately a couple of feet behind you, with both hands on the top part of the board, transfer you upper body weight to the board by pushing the tip slightly under water. Then, when you feel the wave hitting your back, guide your board with your dominant knee. At this point, the wave should push you all the way to the beach. If you manage reach the beach, congratulate yourself. You've just caught your first wave.

The next step is standing up. I'm yet to be able to do that. Wiped out after wiped out took my breath away. Tired, but I'm not defeated yet. Clearly I need more education and practice. I'll conquer this eventually.


Sunway Lagoon


Wiped out with bodyboard


The pink manace. It's damn hard trying to stand on this thing

Kittens for adoption

A good friend of mine had to let go of a mother cat and 4 kittens. The kittens are approximately 4 weeks old and just started eating dry food. Warning : They're extremely cute and playful. Look at the pictures with caution.

Cute little devils aren't they? You've been warned. Hehe.

If you're interested in adopting any one of them or better yet, all of them, kindly contact me via amrizal98@yahoo.com

Dive with Sharks @ Aquaria KLCC

Enrolled myself to Aquaria's Dive with Shark last weekend. There's 2 slots that guest can join, the 1pm and 5 pm. The 1pm slot is usually for certified diver while the 5pm is for non-certified. Aquaria is not really strict about this, guest can request to join the 1pm slot. The whole event sould take you about 3 hours. The first hour is for training and diver's hand signals, and the rest is for prep and the dive itself. The cost of the dive is RM450 for non-certified diver and RM400 for certified divers. I know it sound expensive but bear in mind that there's reasonable amount of risks involved. You're diving in a tank with sharks. Plus, this includes the rental of the diving equiptment, the dvd recording of the whole event and the goody bag you'll be getting. Aquaria is also kind enough to supply me with an instructor to guide me through the whole experience for no additional charges. Talk about value for money.

Getting in the wetsuit was murder. I'm telling you, those things should have a 'dangerous item' label. Turned out, you have to wet it first before doning it on. After quickly slipping in the wetsuit, I was briefed about how to use the mask and the tank and again, drilled with diver's hand signals. This is important because diver's need some way of communicating under water. The prep area is actually their staff room but equipt with shower and a lot of diving equptments. There, you can also see behind the scene of how the tank works. They've got filters for everything; sand, protein etc. Those filter's are huge. My cameraman told me that Aquaria is currently employing about 80 staff.

The oxygen tank weight about 10kg(i think) and you'll also be wearing some sort of heavy belt. Probably to weight a diver down. Wearing flippers and the oxygen tank, you have to walk backwards into the water, and then to the backflip thingy at the edge of the reef. Btw, I saw a mermaid with a pink top came out of the water just before i dive. Hehe..

I was advised to just let the instructor manouver me underwater instead of doing it myself. Don't kick and don't wave your arm. The reason is rapid movements attracts the sharks curiosity. They're not really violent, but the risk is still there. The instructor guided me throughout the whole tank which is a maze. I'd be lost and end up in the shark's den without him.

The day ended with me awarded with a simple certificate. What's cool is the "I survived Dive with Sharks" t-shirt included in the goody bag. You can't buy that at the gift shop. Plus, I've managed to collect about 6 shark teeth. I would highly recommend this to anyone.

Shark's teeth

Check out the rest of the pictures here and at Ghazali's photopages. I haven't receive the dvd yet from Aquaria. I'll keep you guys updated when i get it.

Stepping forward

I'm starting a new blog. Needed to grow out of the friendster's shadow. My old blog is located here