The Los Angeles marathon was absolutely extraordinary. For 42km, I ran with a camera in hand shooting videos like a Hollywood director until the battery went flat.
It has been crazy fun tripping through the USA – but I’m ready to come home tomorrow. 🙂
4 years ago, Eddie from Los Angeles challenged me to run my first marathon.
I took up the challenge, ran the 42km and almost DIED. After crossing the finishing line, I swore I was never gonna run another marathon race again.
Eddie congratulated me. He said perhaps one day, I would fly to L.A. and join him for the L.A. Marathon. He even gave me a shirt that says “L.A. Marathon In Training”.
I laughed it off, thinking no chance in hell would I fly all the way to Los Angeles just to run a marathon. Back then, I did not even have the budget to do so.
Fast forward to 2010.
Here I am today in Los Angeles, fulfilling a gentleman’s promise I made 4 years ago.
It is the first time I have signed up for a marathon outside Malaysia or Singapore. I have worked really hard for this. The past 3 months, I have been juggling between writing for this blog, running my business and training for this marathon.
And in 1 hour’s time I’ll be running my race. I cannot wait.
25,000 people from all over the world has taken part in this race. “The Rock” Dwayne Johnson will be cheering from the side. Shia LeBouf (from Transformers), Sean Astin (from Lord of the Rings), Gordon Ramsey (the foul-mouthed chef) will all be running alongside me.
Wish me luck!
When it comes to pubs & lounges, Kuching still lags a little behind the big cities.
KL has great pubs like Sid’s and Delaney’s. But in Kuching, there’s only a handful of pubs I’d feel comfortable hanging out at without being intimidated by rowdy hooligans.
Hey, I love a good beer as much as the next guy, but if a pub is filled with people who doesn’t not know how to drink responsibly, I’m outta there. But the new Royal Oak at Hills is a little different.
Lounge @ Royal Oak is a new pub/lounge/restaurant taking up prime location at the Hills Shopping Mall, next to Pullman Kuching. They’ve only opened for less than 2 months and already they’ve been getting rave reviews all over the place.
It’s a great place because it’s spacious, not cramped. Service is quick because they have a huge team of staff always running around.
The owner of the place, Sperry Kong is a big fan of Irish pubs, circular bars and being environmentally-friendly. He made all these elements come together in his creation.
The centrepiece at Royal Oak is the bar made out of recycled bottles. Look closely at the bar top, and you’ll realise that it’s made out of 1 sen coins.
Up the stairs is a loft where the dining area is located.
I came here, famished, on a Friday night at 8pm. It was just before the party crowd flocked the place, so it’s still quite alright.
We asked the waitress for recommendations, and she suggested that we start with a plate of Royal Spring Rolls.
I thought the presentation was cute, but fried spring rolls aren’t my favourite stuff to eat in a pub. Instead, I highly recommend the Royal Grilled Chicken Wings.
You get your hands dirty peeling meat off the bones, but as a pub grub, nothing beats a great plate of piping hot chicken wings, especially when it’s grilled and dripping with hot marinade sauce. Mmm…!
For mains, my dining partner ordered Sirloin Steak. It was a little too well-done for her liking and they skimped on the gravy sauce so she didn’t quite enjoy it as much.
I ordered their Royal Alfredo Pasta for myself and totally loved it!
The prawns were fresh, the pasta was tender and the sauce were done just right. It smelt great when the waitress brought them in, and tasted even better when I put a spoonful in my mouth.
Royal Oak is a Guinness outlet and this St Patrick’s Day Festival, like all good Guinness outlets, they are embracing the Irish spirit down to the core.
There are two food promotions concurrently running.
The first promo is a packaged deal. Buy4 half-pints of Guinness Draught together with a platter of finger food, and pay just RM60 nett!
At Royal Oak, they served us lamb meat balls and chicken patties. Don’t be misled though, because these aren’t your usual run-of-the-mill finger food at the pub.
These are specially crafted finger food infused with the essence of Guinness.
The best thing is, different outlets throughout Malaysia are serving different Guinness-infused finger food from now till end of March, so there’s always an opportunity to try something new.
The other promo is to drink a bucket of Guinness Stout or 3 pints of Guinness Draught, and they’ll throw in a luggage padlock for free.
Not quite sure what relevance padlocks have to Guinness, or St Patrick’s Day.
Maybe they are suggesting you padlock your partner up and do all sorts of kinky stuff. I DON’T KNOW LAH.
The important thing is this: the annual Guinness St Patrick’s Day Festival is happening again! This time round it’ll be held at 1Utama this Friday 19 March from 6pm onwards. The highlight of the night is the live stand-up by Malaysi
a’s best comedians: Douglas Lim, Kuah Jenhan and others. More information can be found at .
Too bad this year once again marks the third time in a row that I won’t be in Malaysia for St Patrick’s Day. 🙁
I’m not in Malaysia but in Los Angeles right now. Technically, I should be more excited ‘cos St Patrick’s Day is bigger in the US, right?
Well yes. But not when I have a 42km marathon race to run in a couple of days!
I won’t be drinking. Instead, please Do me a favour and raise a glass to Arthur.
Happy St Patrick’s Day!
Reader Ee Venn Soh, a graphic designer based in Auckland, created this digitally-illustrated portrait of me.
Nice!
But then I think I look a little bit like Cheesie?
Cheesie with a moustache?
The most difficult thing I had to do today was to tell a friend she’s been scammed.
Here’s what happened.
Recently a friend of mine got to know this guy from the UK. After chatting to him online for a couple of months, suddenly this guy wanna fly to Kuching to visit her. At the same time, he claimed he’s gonna look for some investment opportunities.
Obviously my friend was excited to be meeting him.
Unfortunately for her, the meeting never materialised.
On the day he was supposed to arrive into Malaysia, the guy was detained by immigration officers at KLIA. His offence? Not declaring those excess amount of cash in his luggage, reportedly to be some £50,000.
It was her friend’s first trip to Malaysia, and poor guy spent it in the police lockup.
OR SO SHE WAS TOLD.
Upon his arrival, my friend received calls after calls from him desperately pleading for help. She was frantic. All she could think about was how to help him out. She put herself in his shoes, and immediately felt guilty because she was the reason the guy came to Malaysia.
Three days later, another phone call came. It was from the immigration officer, telling her that the UK guy would need to hire a lawyer and pay legal fees to the tune of RM7,000.
This was when I smelt something fishy.
And it wasn’t the bad seafood I ate earlier.
The immigration officer instructed her to deposit this legal money into a Public Bank account. My naive little friend complied.
Desperate to set him free, she transferred RM2,000 of her own money to the immigration officer. She figured, he’s gonna pay her back when he got out anyhow.
But I suspected something was amiss.
Already, I was feeling extremely uncomfortable when she told me the story. I didn’t have a good feeling about this, so hopped on my laptop, searched for “detained at immigration malaysia scam.”
Whaddya know? At least 2 people have blogged about similar experiences. Malay Mail even did a story on such scam.
In the end, I had to do the dirty job – I told her that she’s been scammed.
At first, she was calm and collected. She told me that it doesn’t matter – because money lost can be earned back eventually. And karma will eventually find its way.
Then the floodgates opened. And she cried uncontrollably. How could someone do something so evil like that? How is she even going to trust anyone ever again?
Even more hurtful was the knowledge that this online friend that she’s been talking to for months never actually existed. He was nothing more than a phantom, out to take advantage of her charity and selflessness.
Moral of the story? Never ever give out money to people you’ve never even met.
When I started blogging 5 years ago, one of the reasons I did it was because I had shitloads of time on my hand that I needed to kill.
My blog posts back then tend to be short, mundane and written very quickly without much of a forethought. Over time, pressure from my readers creeped into my head. Somehow my style of blogging evolved to long magazine-type articles with 50 different photos and ends with a punch line.
Soon enough, my readers accepted that long entries and punchlines are essentially ingredients of what makes kennysia.com, kennysia.com.
It becomes a situation that when people log on to kennysia.com, they wanna read long entries, they wanna read something funny. And if my entries aren’t long enough or don’t end with anything funny, I’m gonna find myself a mailbox full of people calling me fat.
A lot of people don’t realise it, but brainstorming for jokes and photoshopping pictures ain’t exactly easy. Doing stuff like these for my blog tend to take up a lot of time. At one point, I was spending TEN hours divided over 3 days just to craft up a single blog entry.
Imagine that. TEN hours just to write ONE single blog post.
It wasn’t a problem for back me then because, like I said, I had shitloads of time. The problem is, these days I cannot even find time to shit. Let alone blog.
Yes, back then I was happy to spend 10 hours crafting up a single blog entry just to make my readers happy.
If I had something short or mundane to say, I would rather not blog about it at all – simply because it does not pass the Kenny Sia Quality Assurance Test™.
The longer I blog, the more I realise kennysia.com is no longer a hobby of mine that I do after work. My website had evolved into an “online lifestyle magazine” of sorts. I had to be careful not to offend people. I had to make sure people enjoy reading my content. I had to do all sorts of quality control to make sure the stuff published on my blog is good enough for an “online lifestyle magazine”.
The difference however, is this.
Whilst established magazines out there have a team of writers and photographers and editors working around the clock. Me? I got nobody. I gotta do it all by myself.
Eventually blogging became more of a chore. I wasn’t enjoying it as much.
Then Twitter came along.
And Twitter is awesome. I can publish one-liners and photos anytime, anywhere, on my phone. I could be sitting on the toilet bowl, or having my lunch, (or both) and I could still update on my Twitter.
Unlike traditional blogging, I don’t have to take photos with my digital camera, think of an idea, then wait until I get in front of my computer to update my blog. I can just do it all on my phone.
It works well with my lifestyle too. Since about 3 years ago, I have been pretty much living off my suitcase and travelling all over the world. Most of the time, I update my Twitter through my phone when it isn’t convenient for me to update on my computer at all.
The problem now is this.
I seem to be managing two completely different online sites – kennysia.com for long carefully-thought out blog entries written on my computer. And twitter.com/kennysia for my short spontaneous thoughts published through my phone.
But I think it is about time that I marry the two.
In future entries, I’ll be transforming kennysia.com into something similar to Twitter.
Updates will be short, simple, not always funny – but quick and frequent.
What it means is that kennysia.com is always gonna remain fresh. I’ll be updating my blog mainly through my phone, but if I do get the time to sit down in front of my laptop, I’ll write my usual long well thought-out entries.
Reason I’m this way is because about to embark on a 3-week long trip to the USA and Australia. I foresee myself not touching my laptop for quite a bit. Twitter will be my best friend, but there will be times when I need to say stuff that cannot be contained in 140 characters or less. So mobile blogging is the way to go.
I think this may very be the direction that blogging is going into.
Only time will tell how well this is gonna work.
Selling because owner no longer needs wearing glasses.
Suits anyone with –5.50 myopia / –0.75 astigmatism on the left eye and –5.50 myopia / –1.25 astigmatism on the right.
100 BUCKS!