World, say hello to Baby Ethan.

Cute little baby, your proud uncle loves you very much. 🙂
May you grow up to be as adorable as I am.

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It’s 3:30am as I typed this.

I arrived in Singapore yesterday morning.
In two hours time, I will be joined by 16,000 other runners at the starting line at the Esplanade. If all goes well, by 11am I’ll hopefully be dragging my sorry ass past the finishing line, wear my new overpriced LV belt as a reward, and hop on that flight back home by Monday night.
Yes. Another year. Another city. Another 42km. 🙂

Last week when I was in KL, I went shopping for some new running gear at The Gardens in preparation for my race.
I needed new running shorts ‘cos I’ve lost much weight that my old pants were getting too loose for me. I was also looking to get new marathon shoes as the adiZeros I wore for the Borneo half marathon was were beginning to feel a little stiff.

(Disclosure: adidas subsidises part of my sporting gear.)
The adidas outlet in The Gardens has this humungous box labelled born again adidas. There’s a hole on top and at the side it reads “FEED ME YOUR OLD SPORTS SHOES AND GET UP TO $50 OFF A NEW PAIR”
For reasons I cannot explain, I stuck my head through the hole.

PHWOAR!
Words cannot describe how much those shoes stink. The collective stench from the bunch of old shoes were so overwhelming, I dieded on the spot.
The staff there looked on helpeless as I croaked and sprawled my lifeless body across the floor, one finger pointing towards my mouth to indicate to them that I needed CPR.
But then I noticed all the staff in the outlet were GUYS. So… *ahem* immediately I woke up.
“Are you ok, sir?” they asked. “Ya ya I’m fine,” I replied. “Impossible is nothing. Right?”

I heard of this born again adidas thing from Mr Miyagi’s blog a few months back and I thought it was a pretty neat campaign they’re doing over there in Singapore. Didn’t realised they had it in Malaysia as well until I saw the big box.
The idea is to get people to trade in their old sports shoes in return for a RM50 or RM100 discount off a pair of new ones.

The collection bins are located at various adidas outlets throughout KL. It’s a nice gesture they’re doing. For every twenty pairs collected, they’ll donate a new pair to the Harvest Centre, a charity organisation helping out underpriviledged families in Sentul.
It’s a win-win situation: you throw away your old sports shoes, they give you discount off your new shoes, some poor kids in Sentul also get new shoes, and you earn yourself some feel-good karma points. 😉
The good thing is, they accept any sports shoes from any brand. Not just adidas, y’know?

For me, I sacrificed this pair of bombastic-coloured bright red Nike Air to the big box. It was in such a bad condition that the air-cushioned bits of the shoes have fallen off and it should be renamed Nike No Air.)

I bought this pair of Nikes almost ten years back, about the time when I started taking up running as a sport. It was the first pair of running shoes I ever bought for myself.
Until that day, I never had the heart to throw it away even with the pathetic state that it was in.

But hey, it’s just taking up space in my cupboard anyway.
So like breaking up from a relationship, it’s time to let it go and move on.

With the RM50 discount voucher, I got myself this is my pair of blue-coloured adiZero LTs. The price was RM350 after discount, which is still fairly expensive of course, but I know what I’m getting.

These flats are lightweight and built for long distance racing. It’s also got a stronger grip on the soles compared to my older pair of adiZeros, which is useful in the likely case that it rains in Singapore – considering it’s the monsoon season and all.
Anyway, the most important gear for a marathon is always the shoes, so I ain’t gonna compromise on that.

Let’s see if I can outrun 42km of kiasu-ness in these babies.

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KY, Cheesie and I attended the GUINNESS® Gastronomic Workshop hosted by celebrity chef Emmanuel Stroobant.

I must admit that I am completely hopeless when it comes to cooking.
I have been told many times that women find men who knows how to cook sexy and attractive. Case in point, during this year’s CLEO 50 Most Eligible Bachelor competition, Bachelor #3 Ebi Kornelis whooped 49 other bachelors’ collective asses to top the online polls.

All because he knows how to make ikan bakar!
It’s not that I do not know how to cook. I used to cook myself instant noodles all the time. But I dunno why people keep saying that cooking instant noodles is not considered “real” cooking.
What lah, cooking for “real” or “fake one meh?

My mom was not impressed when I told her that I don’t wanna learn how to cook.
She insisted that I was being lazy. Instead of learning how to cook, I gave her stupid excuses like how cooking is so damn difficult and how I could accidentally burn the house down if I wasn’t careful.
“COOKING IS EASY!” she said. I went on and on about how it’s even EASIER to pay someone RM10 to do the same thing, but all that resulted was her rolling her eyes and offering to show me the kitchen.
Too bad. Instead of taking up her offer, I went straight to a CELEBRITY CHEF!

This is the AFC’s Chef In Black Emmanuel Stroobant, a man blessed with a body that resembled more like a male fashion model than the master chef of an exclusive fine-dining restaurant in Singapore.
Watching Emmanuel Stroobant demonstrate his cooking skills, I began to doubt my mom’s assertion that “COOKING IS EASY!”

Watching Emmanuel did his thing, I thought he looked more like he was building IRONMAN than heating up some tuna.
There were flame throwers, test tubes, precision digital scales among other gadgets more likely to be found in James Bond’s arsenal than my mom’s kitchen.

Chef in Black making GUINNESS® flavoured sorbet

Emmanuel was very fast. His main target audience are the senior chefs from the big name restaurants in Klang Valley, who attended the workshop to learn how to creatively incorporate GUINNESS® into their cooking. As a beginner with very little experience in the kitchen, I only managed to absorb a small portion of what he had shown us.

The infusion of GUINNESS® in food isn’t exactly something new.
The bold, distinctive and signature bittersweet taste of the legendary black beer complements extremely well with either sweet or salty dishes. Although not widely explored before, using GUINNESS® in cooking is quickly gaining popularity. In fact, one of the most popular dishes in Kuching’s seafood restaurants are GUINNESS® chicken wings.

The food Emmanuel Strooband created all turned out looking very pretty.

This is the Tuna Tar-Tar Taco With GUINNESS®.
It’s a starter dish quite easily prepared with Sashimi-grade tuna, gherkin, shallot, caper, mayonnaise, tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, tabasco sauce and GUINNESS® all mixed together and served on a taco.

This is the main course, Kakuni Style Braised Chicken with GUINNESS®, Fresh Herb Risotto and GUINNESS® Poached Oyster.

The dessert dish Emmanuel prepared is called “The Giodness”.
It’s GUINNESS® jelly, brownies and crumble nicely layered inside a shot glass, then topped with coffee ice-cream and finished with foam. Very yummy!

After the cooking demonstration by Emmanuel, the organizers had a little something up their sleeves for those in attendance. There was a live hands-on cooking session where attendees were chosen to go on stage and duplicate those dishes that the celebrity chef had demonstrated earlier.
Having not slept well the night before, I was secretly praying that they not to pick me because, y’know, I don’t wanna be known as the guy responsible for burning Mandarin Oriental down.

Luckily, KY was picked.

Cheesie was also picked.

But in the end, I also kena picked.
ARGHHH!!!

My team mates were the chef from The Apartment and a journalist from The Sun, and we’re tasked to prepare the main course.

It was the most difficult dish from the demonstration earlier.
Please lah I don’t even know how to cut an onion how am I supposed to cook such a complicated main course!

This was me frantically studying my notes while the master chef from The Apartment showed me HOW TO CUT AN ONION.

Look mom, I’m cutting an onion!

And I’m stirring the pot!

While I cooked the fresh herb risotto, my two other team mates diligently prepared the braised chicken thigh.
They’ve put together a mixture of water, black pepper, sugar, soy, garlic, ginger, aniseed pod and GUINNESS®. The chicken thigh was baked in it for 20 minutes, then pan-fried and served with a little bit of the mixture as sauce. (E-mail me if anyone is interested in more detailed recipe)

Meanwhile, my risotto was cooked “al dente” (phwoar, first time I use such a canggih word here) and I scooped it onto a round shaper for presentation.
Half an hour later, we presented our masterpiece!

Not bad aye?
Obviously it was nothing compared to the one Emmanuel made earlier, but it was surprisingly very tasty and looked like something I’d pay good money for.

This is me and my team mates, and me flaring my nose as if to take all the credit.
That was my first time cooking a meal fit for fine-dining.
I was overcome with a sense of personal satisfaction as I served my creation to my friends sitting in the front row, and watched as their face changed (and not foam at the mouth or turn green).

It’s a weird but wonderful feeling. This must be why so many people enjoy cooking as a hobby. If you’re reading this mom, I hope you’re happy I took that first step towards cooking. 🙂
Of course, all credits go to the master chef at The Apartment for guiding me through, and the “Chef In Black” Emmanuel Stroobant for the easy to follow recipe.

And errr… no, I was not grabbing his butt.

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In one week, I’ll be in Kota Kinabalu taking part in the Borneo Marathon.

The Borneo Marathon came at the right time for me. I fell in love with KK since climbing Mount Kinabalu there last year and have been looking for an excuse to go back there since.
I signed up for the 21km race to prepare me for my 42km marathon in Singapore this December. Besides, a long time reader of kennysia.com is organizing it, and the least I could do is throw her some support.
Anyway, I’ve started training since about two months ago, running at least three times a week and clocking in more and more kilometres each time. Last Sunday was my best effort so far – 15km in two hours non-stop.

Friends and family are surprised at how seriously I take my training. I stick to my training program quite rigidly, sometimes to the point of absurdity. I’ve had the most awful experiences of waking up at the ungodly hour of 6am for a run, running at night or even running under heavy rain.
The problem with marathon training is that you do very long distances, and in a place like Kuching there isn’t many places for you to run. Very often, training get boring quickly if you just run around the same few park. It also doesn’t help the fact that there is only ONE decent park for running in the whole of Kuching – Stutong Park.

The jogging track in Stutong Park is only 1.6km long. When you’re doing 15km, there’s only so many laps you could do until you had enough looking at the SAME BLOODY TREES all the time.
So recently, I laid off Stutong Park and took my training to the streets.

And then I got addicted to it.
Horrible traffic smokes aside, I discovered running on the road is actually a lot more fun! Sure, it’s a little dangerous and sometimes I need to break my rhythm to cross the road. But I like running on the road because sometimes I’d notice quirky little things about Kuching that I wouldn’t have noticed if I were just driving around in my car.

Things like parents sending their cute little kids to school.
Or that hawker stall on Foochow Road selling kolo mee right out of their home car porch.
Who would’ve thought that after living in my small hometown for so long, I still don’t know so many things about it. Quaint new discoveries like those still tickle my fancy.

Another problem with marathon training is that because I’ve been travelling a lot lately, so sometimes I’d need to improvise. Since I begun my training, I’ve been flown off to Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, even to as far as Paris and London.
Normally I’d put my training on hold while I’m out of town. But I knew if I did that, come race day, my race results would suck so bad that I’d still be running when everyone else have finished packing up their bags and go home.

As a habit now, I pack my running shoes when I travel. And through that, I discovered the joy of running in different cities around the world.
Of course, it’s easy to lose your way in a foreign city.
Depending on how you look at it, getting lost can be part of the problem, or part of the fun.

I always carry my HTC Touch Diamond when I run in a foreign city.
I love this phone. The Diamond is an absolute gem for runners. It is one the thinnest, lightest PDA phone on the market so it’s damn easy to carry around when I’m running. If I got lost, I can use the GPS function to find out where I am.
If I got REALLY lost, I can always use it make an emergency phone call.

When I ran in KL, I found Lake Gardens a God-sent (or rather, a “DBKL-sent”) in a city filled with traffic smoke.

Bangkok’s traffic is not much better. On top of that, their footpaths are bumpy and narrow. Many times I nearly tripped over because their footpaths have more holes than Ahmad Ismail’s face.
But that’s ok, I can forgive that. (The footpaths, not Ahmad Ismail’s face.)

I ran once when I was in Paris, the City of Love.
From where I stayed in the Jewish enclave of Quartier du Marais, I jogged along the tree-lined boulevards, past Notre Dame Cathedral then all the way down Jardin du Luxembourg, joining the locals doing laps around sculptures and statues, including one miniature version of the Statue of Liberty.

But by far, the best city I ran in during my training is London.
The weather has been nothing but awesome during my time there. It was never too hot, never too cold, and not once did it even drizzle when I ran.

Londoners love the great outdoors so there are always heaps of beautiful parks throughout the city to wander into.
The bigger ones like Hyde Park, St James Park and Kensington Gardens are nicely decorated with ponds, lakes, sculptures and fountains.

Occassionally, you may see a duck sunbaking by the pond.

Or a hungry squirrel roaming about in the park.
Squirrels are cute. They are exactly like hamsters, but with a bushier tail.

The views along London’s running tracks are absolutely stunning.
There’s this hill on the outskirts of the city called Hampstead Heath where I ran to one morning to catch the hilltop views of London city. Hampstead Heath is a big ancient park where Londoners used to picnic and and fly kites. Now, it’s a place where many Londoners taking their dogs out for a walk.

In Hampstead Heath, there are plenty of natural ponds where you can go for a cold swim the old-fashioned way without smelling like chlorine afterwards.
People have been swimming in these ponds since at least 200 years old. The council had wanted ban swimming in them due to health risks, but those crazy Londoners fought against it and won.

There’s a secondary school near Hampstead Heath. That morning, I spotted a couple of students walking to school.
I like their school uniform very much. It reminded me of Harry Potter.

Amazing. Even those schoolkids look like Ron Weasley and Harry Potter.
Speaking of Harry Potter, there IS actually a Platform 9 3/4 at King’s Cross Station.

Don’t laugh. I know I look stupid singlets and shorts.
I love noticing amusing little things about London when I wander through the streets.

There’s this takeaway restaurant near my hotel with a stupid name called “Jerk Chicken”.
I believe their next business venture is gonna be selling roast pork called “Bastard Pig”.

In Parliament Square, next to the British Parliament, a protest match was going on.
The loud but peaceful protest was against knife crime, which has become a serious epidemic lately in London. A lot of people joined in on the match and it attracted a lotta attention.

Even the dogs joined in on the protest.
Hundreds of policemen were present. Instead of shooting protestors with water cannons, the police marched alongside them and cordoned off streets to ensure safe and smooth traffic flow.

Heck, those policemen were so cooperative, you can even blatantly drink beer behind their back and he wouldn’t arrest ya.

This man in crutches here is Brian Haw.
He is an anti-war protestor who has gained worldwide media attention for his unconventional way of getting his message across.

Brian Haw has been sleeping in this camp in front of the British parliament houses since 2001.
That’s SEVEN FREAKIN’ YEARS, abandoning his own home to live on the side of the road to stage a one-man protest against war.
Everyday for seven years, those politicians going to work have no choice but to walk past Brian’s posters and be reminded of the atrocities they’ve caused in Iraq. Now that’s what I called hardcore.

I can’t imagine anyone living outdoors for 7 years just to make a statement. Can you do that?
Bloody hell, I can’t even stay still in one city for two weeks.

People here have nightmares everyday

One thing I really like about running in London, is their street names.

They either sound like they’re from Monopoly, or something your genitals would require stitches afterwards.

On my last day in London before I return to Kuching, I had the most satisfying 8 mile run from my hotel in Islington all the way to The Big Ben.

Along the way, I passed by many landmarks I recognised from Monopoly.
Starting from The Angel Islington, I went past Pentonville Road, King’s Cross Station, Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly, Pall Mall, and finally Trafalgar.

It’s so exciting to see these venues come alive from the legendary 2D board game I have played since young. I felt as if I’ve already known them before I even set foot in London. If only Monopoly money were real, I’d buy them as I walked past them.
There was one only problem though.

I did not past GO. Did not collect $200.
🙁

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… of his pet hamsters.

There’s nothing quite like watching your two innocent furry little creatures going at it at supersonic speed. That’s after one year of wondering why they never mated.
Goodness. They sure are horny alright. Look at them go!

Even my phone doesn’t vibrate as quickly as they did.

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Hello everybahdy, this is Egg McMuffin.

Egg McMuffin is a present from Pinkpau. It’s yellow, it’s round and it’s very very soft. I have been obsessing over him ever since I saw it on her blog, so she bought one for me right before she left for New York.
Thank you, Su Ann. Now I have something to use as a football.

Kidding!
Don’t worry, I will sayang my Egg McMuffin so when you come back he can mate with your Egg McMuffin. I know your Egg McMuffin is male as well but that is okay.
They can just swear on a religious book and pretend it never actually took place.

Thank you again. I really like it. I also have no idea why I like your overstuffed round chicken so much.
But I think it’s because I secretly think he looks like me.

Yes, our resemblance is just so uncanny.

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I had wanted to post this up earlier but my friend didn’t let me. She said it’s too heartbreaking.

This happened last year, at a store called Milky Lane in Pavilion KL shortly after its grand opening. This friend of mine and I were sitting in store having coffee when her bag was mysterious stolen from right under her nose. Inside her bag was all her personal belongings including her latest paycheck, new phone and some jewellery.
She placed her big bag on the floor next to her chair while we sat back facing the entrance. That’s when a dodgy Chinaman entered and swiped her bag away without anyone of us noticing. Lucky for him. If he were caught red-handed, I bet ya he’d be walking out of Pavilion with his testicles hanging from his teeth.

We notified mall security immediately when we realised her bag was stolen. As expected, they were sympathetic but they couldn’t do much. All they did was offering her a shoulder to cry on.
A quick check with the store’s CCTV recordings revealed the modus operandi of the thief in action.

The moral of the story is: buy insurance.

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Sorry to all you haters out there.

But you dickwads gotta get your facts from more credible sources before you all start bashing me.
If you do things without integrity, then I don’t owe you an explanation. If you’re too coward to meet me face to face, then I don’t owe you an explanation. If you’re not a genuine friend or family of mine, then I most definitely do not owe you a freaking explanation.
My life is not for your entertainment, so feel free to kiss my arse and fuck off.

mlm_d^_^b_mlm
Now that that’s out of the way, regular kennysia.com postings will resume shortly after this entry. 🙂

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Why do I have to deal with all these bullshit?

I should have died in that car crash.

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This is my car.

This is my car after it crashed into a ditch.

Sigh. This happened last week when I was driving back to Kuching from Sematan after attending a 5-day training course.
I was trying to get back as soon as I could because I’m missing my nephew and nieces, and I wanna see them before I fly off to KL.

Me being me, I ignored the fact that the road was slippery due to rain, and cruised into a blind corner too fast too furious.
Next thing I know, I lost control of the car, skidded down the bend, spun around twice before flying off the highway and crashing into a ditch.

Funny thing was, I distinctively remembered that during that moment, everything sorta was happening in slow motion. Right before my car skidded off the path, I remember thinking to myself, “Hmmm… this is gonna cost me a lotta money!”

It’s a miraculous stroke of luck that I actually managed to survive the car crash unharmed.
In a situation like this, I could easily have been killed by an oncoming traffic or get knocked out on impact. My seatbelt literally saved my life, and I came out of the car wreck unscathed.

Anyway, my car is now in the workshop after raking up RM4,000 in repair bills.
My front bumper suffered a big dent, my two front tyres bursted and I’m sure the wheel alignment is all out of whack. The tow truck charged me RM300 to haul my vehicle 50km back to Kuching and I have to pay another RM300 in police summons.

Good thing I have insurance to soften the financial impact.

The moral of the story is: buy insurance.

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