James Ramya Rajan J

🥾Last practice hike before Mt. Rinjani 🌋

On Sunday, we did our last practice hike before the next week's trek at Mt. Rinjani. We decided to start 6am at Bukit Gasing, since we wanted to practice the use of head lamps and hiking in the dark.

The hiking in the dark went well and 4 trips of the stamina hill was the limit for me. Otherwise, I felt happy at the way I finished the trek. We completed the 7km loop in 4h. I feel confident about next week's trek now.🤞🏼

The hike was immediately followed up by a breakfast at Kanna Curry House, Petaling Jaya 📍

Finally tasted Bak kut teh

When we got to know that we will be moving to Kuala Lumpur, I went on a spree of watching YouTube videos about places to eat and dishes to explore. That is when I first heard about Bak kut teh in Mickey Chen’s video.

Bak kut teh is a pork dish cooked in broth. It is very popular in Malaysia and Singapore. I has its origins among the Hokkien and Teochew community. The name translates as “meat bone tea”.

And when I landed here and told people that I wanted to try it out, almost everyone warned me about the “herbal taste” of it. I really wanted to try it, but with someone who knew a good place to go, how to order. I never found that guide.

Last week, our wonderful Chinese neighbour came by with some fruits for our son and when asked to partake a snack, she said she was heavy with the Bak kut teh breakfast. So natually I enquired about the place and told her, I would like to join her next time.

That conversation led to me finally I tasted my first Bak kut teh today and loved it. We went to a place in Seri Bintang. It was a collection of stalls referred to as Kopitiam 818 Restaurant. I was told this is Klang style Bak kut teh. Just a luscious and flavourful broth that I loved having multiple cups of. The meat was tender from hours of simmering and all the collagen 🤩

It is a very hearty breakfast meal, so maybe next time I will combine with hike at the nearby Seri Bintang trail!

#MalaysianDiary #DiningOut

Such a wonderful piece of life advice that I found this post on Kotte.

Years ago, when I was in my 20s, a bold and artistically daring older friend who has since passed on gave me what I often think was the best advice I have ever gotten. I was worrying what ‘people would think’ of a decision I had made, and she said, “Amanda, There is no audience."

—Amanda Fortini on Twitter

🥾Hiking the Gasing Loop 📍

As a practice for the upcoming Mt. Rinjani trek, we attempted a longer hike at Bukit Gasing last Sunday. This was my 3rd time hiking at Bukit Gasing and it is one of my favourite spots in the city. It is challenging, but it is also straining. It has plenty of trails, so you are never bored doing the same route.

We started at 7.30am and did a longer loop, with multiple trips of the stamina hill.

While the hike was fairly manageable, the weather was extremely humid that day. The dresses were all soaking wet by the end of the hike at 11.30am.

We will be doing one more practice session next weekend here, before we set off to summit Mt. Rinjani!

This week #OhBoy has no school owing to Ramadan celebrations. So we went about our old routine of morning walks and coffee.

And this was his first time enjoying a chocolate filled donut. At each bite he was letting me know that it was very yummy!

🥾Hiking Taman Tugu

After a break on last Thursday, resumed our Thursday Hikes with the fellow diplomatic spouses here in Kuala Lumpur. With most of them beginners, this was a perfect spot to get them started, after warming up at TTDI in the earlier weeks.

It was just us in the entire trail, till be hit the last check point. The day was humid, but otherwise the trek was good.

It was a good start. I hope in May they all get to a level of doing the Gasing Loop!

The Red Vein Flowering Maple that we found in Ranau, Sabah

Day 2 of #mbapr : Flowers 📷

🥾Hiking Gunung Bunga Buah 📍

As a practice for our upcoming Mt. Rinjani hike, we did a long duration practice hike. We started at 6.30am from KL and then started the hike from the trail head at 7.30am.

This was my first time on such a long trail and I was also testing out a lot of my new gear — Hydration Vest and Flask, Compression Pants, long sleeve shirt and new socks. All of them worked well without any complaints. 🙌

The initial part of the trail till the entrance of Bunga Buah was really good. We were walking through the clouds.

The trail after that was full of ups and downs, but what made it really hard were the roots. One had to be very watching where to place the feet and vary of tripping over the broken roots. I was the slow one in the group, inspite of being the youngest. You realise soon that age is just a number and fitness is more of what you practice in your day to day life.

I did not push myself to be fast, but I was not lagging too behind either.

The views were great and the hike got cooler as we reached the top.

Overall it was enjoyable, but I don’t think I would put myself through those roots, until I am practicing for a long hike like for Mt. Rinjani.

At the end of the hike, I finished tired but not sore. I was smiling and strong. I am now hopeful of managing the long hike at Rinjani.

We wiped ourselves and then had a nice lunch and beers at the Chinese restaurant nearby

The Sabah trip begins with a “too late to board” scare and we sprinting to the gate. We spent too much time enjoying that Kaya Toast😂😂😂

Some stars aligned on my hiking luck and I found myself having a spot with a hiking group that had planned everything for summiting Mt. Rinjani ⛰️ this April.

So every weekend is a practice to build up strength for the 3 day trek of Mt. Rinjani. This picture was taken this weekend’s hike 🥾 at Bukit Gasing.

📺 Beef, Netflix ★★★★★

A few weeks ago, we finished season 1 this series. We absolutely loved it. It touches on so many aspects of the mental health and with so much compassion.

This was the first time I was watching Ali Wong and Steven Yeun perform. And both were so good in their roles!

The last episode of the season, was one of the best “tripping” experiences brought out on screen.

📺 Criminal Record, Apple TV+ ★★★★★

We finally finished this series last week. It checks a lot of boxes to make pertinent points on racial prejudice, pressures in criminal justice system to “deliver” something, collateral damages etc. The tension between the two opposing detectives, is so palpable and enjoyable. Each episode ends in a nice cliffhanger.

Cush Jumbo and Peter Capaldi nail their parts and live their characters. Thoroughly enjoyed every episode. Highly recommend it.

Anak Baba, Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur 📍

Earlier this week, a friend was stopping over in KL and was available for lunch. Since he was open to tasting some local fare, took him out to Anak Baba in Brickfields.

It is a quaint little place, with simple seating arrangement of table and stools and a lot of natural sunlight through the translucent roof. I had been there earlier once and loved their food.

This time around I tried their Nasi Lemak with fried chicken. Everything was spot on, but that fried chicken marinated in turmeric was just so rightly done—a light layer of fried coating on the outside and juicy on the inside!

The friend has Nyonya Laksa, which I had tried previously here. He loved it too.

We also had their Popiah (Peranakan Spring Roll), Pai Tee (picture below) and Cendol to round it all off.

Overall the food and the interesting conversation, made it a memorable afternoon! Hope to bring the family here soon!

#MalaysianDiary #DiningOut

Lunch at Chowkit area of Kuala Lumpur

A cancelled meeting of The Missus resulted in we getting to do a quick lunch date on a weekday. We met at El Cero📍 first and had a bunch of of tapas. While Tapas were good, the mains did not interest us, so we went out looking for another place.

This part of Chow Kit is peppered with restaurants and we landed at Gavel📍 just that was a couple of doors away from El Cero. Gavel is a quaint little place. We wanted something quick and hence picked Fish & Chips, which was the dish of the day. It did not disappoint. I really want to come there on Sunday for their Sunday Roast!

#MalaysianDiary #DiningOut

Started watching a new 📺 TV Series — Criminal Record on Apple TV+ this week. We are just 3 episodes in and what a brilliant series it is already!

Cush Jumbo and Peter Capaldi are acing it as expected! Their scenes of face-off are such a treat.

🥾 Hiking Bukit Gasing, Kuala Lumpur

This Sunday’s hike was at Bukit Gasing, with the same set of hiking friends as last week and a few more.

It was lovely hike. We finished the entire hike of 5.25km in about 2.5h. The trail is well maintained and the suspension bridges, add a bit of fun to the hike.

One thing, I really love about Kuala Lumpur is the access to hiking spots within the city!

📽Neru, 2023 ★★★½

On recommendation from a friend we watched the Malayalam movie Neru (Truth) a few weeks ago.

In typical Jeetu Joseph fashion, everything about the crime is laid out to you the audience. The drama is then about the ability of the prosecutor to prove beyond reasonable doubt in court. The Jeetu does it by stacking his scenes in a cat and mouse style of sequences.

The courtroom scenes were well written. Anaswara Rajan, the actor who performed the role of the victim was brilliantly casted!

It was a decent watch. And we were watching a court room drama after ages, so it was a welcome change.

This post from Ben Werdmuller on the anxiety of catching up with social media resonated with me a lot. I am also on the same path — uninstalling apps from phone and posting only on this site.

Social, I love you, but you’re bringing me down

Posting in a space I control isn’t just about the principle anymore. It’s a kind of self-preservation. I want to preserve my attention and my autonomy. I accept that I’m addicted, and I would like to curb that addiction. We all only have so much time to spend...

📺 Slow Horses, Apple TV+ ★★★★★

Last week, I finished the 3rd season of Slow Horses. IMO, it is one of the best spy series on TV. It is not stuffed with action, but rather more like tense spy drama. It has a lot going for it — good writing, cracker dialogues, great characters and actors, good ol’ British humour and crafty twists.

My earlier benchmark for good spy drama on TV was Spooks (2002-2011). I know it is a couple of decades old and I am dating myself here, but it’s characters — Sir Harry Pearce and Ruth Evershed, were immortalised by their actors. One can draw a parallel for that relationship in Slow Horses between Jackson Lamb and Ruth Evershed. Each character in Slow Horse is an odd ball and their quirks add so much to the drama!

Cannot wait for Season 4 to be streamed!

🥾Hiking Gunung Datuk, Negeri Sembilan

Yesterday I went hiking up Gunung Datuk with a friend and his hiking group. This was my first long hike in KL and in a while too.

We started climbing about 7.15am and summited around 1h 45m later. The initial part, with the rocky trail and the jutting out roots was the hardest part.

The strong winds at the summit gave us a welcome break from all the exhaustion. After a quick round of snacks, we went up to the viewing point and clicked a few pictures.

We came back down in 1h 15m. While climbing down was less exhausting, it was strenuous on the knees. The hiking poles were put to good use to transfer some of the weight on to them!

Overall it was great hike. Looking forward to do many more in the coming months!

#MalaysianDiary

📽12th Fail, 2023 ★★★★½

Watched this movie a couple of weeks ago. Loved it. Everything was almost perfect. The story arc, the characters, the actors — everything worked out for me. Also having seen the preparation for UPSC up close, and the toll it takes on students, the struggles they go through, the heart wrenching stories of those who put in their all, this movie really brought it all out very well and it brought back a lot of memories of those times.

The casting was just spot on. Vikrant Massey just lives the part and convinces you. I had only seen him earlier in A Death in the Gunj. Looking forward to his other projects.

Good tidings! The Supreme Court of India has struck down the use of Electoral Bonds effectively immediately and make public the information of all the contributions made since 2019. 🙌🙌🙌

Electoral Bonds were an opaque system that enabled anonymous donations to political parties. While the claimed intention was to make political funding legitimate through mainstream banking channels, it was far from transparent as the donors were kept anonymous.

I hope the next amendment makes all parts of donations to political parties public information! 🤞

Happy Valentines day! ❤️

We made brownies that both The Missus and #OhBoy loved. They call it the WBB — World’s Best Brownie.

The reason I am telling this is to share the wonderful recipe from Serious Eats by Stella Parks / Bravetart.

Check it out —

Glossy Fudge Brownies Recipe | BraveTart

I was a software engineer till 2004, when I was actively writing code. Then MBA happened and the most code I ever wrote was in Microsoft Excel. And for the last decade and half in product management, the most I would do is read documentation to understand how something worked or sit with my development team to logically debug an issue (sometimes much to their annoyance!).

But over the last few months I have gotten back to coding, thanks to ChatGPT. It has been such a good companion for me to code with. No more reading through documentation or looking for boiler plate code in StackOverflow or GitHub to kickstart the development. All I need to do now is to keep explaining in plain English what I want, copy the code, tweak parts of it to my liking, run it, throw back the error at ChatGPT and then let it provide alternatives. Rinse and repeat.

The next decade in software engineering and development is going to be pretty wild!

The school was closed for #OhBoy, so we took a bus ride and stopped by at Bukit Damansara for a coffee. Our usual coffee shop was closed, but there were huge cheers from the pubs around. It is Super Bowl night, so we are here watching a game neither understand. 🤣

#MalaysianDiary