Thursday ramblings

I have an agreement I have to send in by today so of course I start doing all sorts of other things including this blog post until there's nothing else left to do but to start on the damn thing... so anyway, last Friday during a BV II Delicious lunch with Eza, she mentioned Central Market, somewhere I haven't been probably in almost a decade. Before there was KLCC or One Utama or heck, even Sogo, there had been Central Market where we used to meet up with friends or boyfriends. CM was conveniently located next to Bus Stand Klang and every one I knew used to travel by Bas Mini or Bas Srijaya. I would take the No 21 bus from Taman Tun and Nazri, my now-husband-then-boyfriend would take the No. 16 or 14 from Gombak and we'd all meet up with friends at CM. I can't remember what it was we did at CM which took almost the whole day, sometimes we'd eat upstairs, walk around, buy asam timbang, watch the artists painting with oil paints or crayons. When I started working at my second job at Leboh Ampang, I'd still walk to CM from time to time to go to the 2nd hand book store there which stocked backdated magazines, old Mills & Boons, the Adventurer series of books that I loved reading during my childhood where you had to skip from different pages throughout the book depending on the option you chose at the end of each page and my favourite, old Agatha Christie books.

So on Tuesday, as I was driving in KL, I saw I was heading towards CM and decided it would be a good day to revisit an old haunt. Wow, CM is all cleaned up and sparkly now. Some corners looked familiar, some were totally new but what made my day was that my favourite 2nd hand bookshop is still there! Even the uncles manning it look the same albeit older.
And what next made my day was finding there Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel "A Pale View of Hills" which I read for the first time and continued reading this morning until I was late for work. As I reached the ending I thought "No way!! Did she just say "we"??" and now after work I have to read it all over again to see the story for what it really is. I love books that linger on in my head even after I've finished reading it.

My favourite girl in my favourite 2nd hand book store