MIFB 2007

As usual, beside book exhibitions and some cultural events, only food can entice us to crowded exhibition halls ..... :-)

We went to the 8th Malaysia International Food & Beverage Trade Fair at the MATRADE Exhibition & Convention Centre (MECC) on Saturday 14th of July 2007, the last day of a three day trade fair. This is the first time I have been there and the first impression was that the halls were too small for even this medium-sized trade fair, let alone the huge international fairs!

The exhibition was spread over two halls on two sides of the road. I had expected the main hall to be a large open plan space but was deeply disappointed. The trade fair was rendered rather discontinuous by narrow connecting doors with escalators/walls/pillars that blocked the overall view of the trade fair and impaired the smooth flow of the visitors through the exhibition!

That's bad, bad, bad!!!

Why? When visiting a trade fair like this, it is important to be able to move systematically and linearly through the displays to have a good overall view first and then to return to specific booths/sections of special interests. Here one have to sort of meander around and that is a real waste of time :-)

Back to the fair .....

Where else but at such trade fairs can one find hundred of sexy young men in office attire serving luscious pieces of juicy fresh/preserved fruits, cups of drinks and bite-sized morsels of pastries/meat/etc and telling you to try, try, try!!! It was near impossible to keep down and hidden the urges to lick the fingers holding out the food and then ask for more ... maybe, even the contact numbers or e-mails .... :-) Or maybe even ask if they can place the offerings on or near even more tantalising body parts and let us nibble on them :-)

One see hunky and twinky chefs or chefs-wannabes and think how wonderful if one can drag one home and be served, in more than one ways :-)

Unfortunately, I have to make do with some more sedate and tame images .... like these sweet and really juicy pears from Taiwan ...


or this pile of fruits and vegetables ...


However as far as trade shows for food goes, this MIFB is a minion compared to the premier Food and Hotel Malaysia 2007 to be held at the KLCC Convention Centre from 22-25 August 2007. Unfortunately, not much information is available on the website yet for this show, which is a biennial event.

This is THE food show to go to. Not only you get lots of local beef but the place will be packed full with foreign beef as well :-) You will truly salivate at the variety of food available to eat or try and the eye candies to ogle at!!! :-)

Quiz : How are you in bed?

Take this quiz ... be honest :-)

How are you in bed?

We all wish to be SEX GODS! :-)

A Little Space .....

When we bought the house in PJ many many years ago, we really cannot renovate the house to our exact liking. We were constrained by the four walls, the supporting beams, the supporting walls, the neighbours, the physical space and so on and so forth ....

All except the garden.....

Indeed, our garden - that little bit of managed wilderness that is truly our private own space, was in fact, the only part of the house that when we got it, we completely laid waste to it except for the lone mango tree which we retained for shade, and started off with a truly empty plot of earth and free for us to work on - constrained no doubt by the four walls :-)

Our neighbours thought that we intended to have the whole space laid down with concrete as they all have done ... and were aghast to see us had the entire space dug down to four feet deep and then rebuilt with rich fertile soil ......

The result?

What a feeling it is to walk through the garden now and when you look up, you see this .....

On a bright sunny day, the sun rays filter through the red palm leaves and the trees and you can feel the cool calm surrounding and a glorious away-from-it-all feeling!

Ah, the mango tree .... the only tree that we kept as a shade tree when we cleared up the rest of the garden.

It is so symbolic ... after all, which Malaysian house can be said to be Malaysian without the mango tree .... ?:-)

Nestled in the mango tree is this huge bird nest fern that was originally a small sickly-looking pot-plant discarded on the roadside many years ago and which we found and nurtured into this glorious plant!

Another shade tree is the red bottle brush ......


I fell in love with this tree the first time I saw it years ago in Australia ...

Wandering around in the garden, on the ground, is this beautiful flowering "banana" plant ....


It is always a glorious sight and the flowers last for months and just grow taller and taller .....

Another beautiful plant on the ground ....

It spreads fast and is a prodigious flowering plant and provide an excellent ground cover in difficult-to-reach areas and in odd spots of the garden.

At eye-level, we have the gardenia with large fragrant white flowers and truly inspiring in the evenings when the fragrance wafted through the garden ....

Another bush with incredibly fragrant flowers is this "wrightia religiosa" or "shuimei" or "水 梅“ and the original plant was a gift from an instructor in bonsai when we were living in Singapore some two decades ago. The original plant had since then spread throughout our garden here in PJ an in our other homes and widely-distributed to many of our friends all over Malaysia.

We have this plant as bushes throughout the garden and as bonsai plants. It is an incredibly hardy plant and can withstand long periods without water under the hot sun! It is one plant that should be in every garden as it produce prodigious numbers of small white flowers with an incredible yet light fragrance throughout the year. The fragrance pervades the entire garden and there is nothing more uplifting than to open the upstairs windows and get a strong whiff of this beautiful fragrance. We have two varieties in the garden - the flowers with a single layer of petals and the one with the double-layer of petals. The latter is more beautiful but the fragrance is much reduced.

In another part of the garden - ah, the red passion flowers .... and a gift from a passionate lover :-)

An incredible climber - it climbs to the rooftops and the top of the trees and produce large stunning bright red flowers.

This is just a small part of our little space - unfortunately, none of the pictures shown have any of the more striking features that can identify our garden immediately should you live in our vicinity :-) and those were some of the more interesting aspects of our garden :-)

Next part of this blog will be on who else share this little space with us and there are many many of them .... :-)