Note: Some people have noticed how I’ve stopped referring to Kitteh as Kitteh but now as Shorty. Just like how I stopped referring to her as Princess but as Kitteh some months back. The thing about Shorty and I is that we somehow come up with different names to call each other every and then. Some are cute and romantic, some are not. These nick names come up as a result of certain things that happen in our daily lives. Like lately Shorty did something that made her look like the cute red monster character in the iPhone game Mega Jump, so I called her Mega Jump for a while.
The latest though is…. she calls me Fatty and I call her Shorty. Haha I know it’s hardly romantic and more platonic than anything but that’s just the way we are. We’re like best friends that just happen to fall in love.
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Every year I normally spend New Year’s Eve at a private house party with some friends somewhere. This year though Shorty and I decided to do something different. We decided to actually go out and witness some of that New Year’s Eve action on the streets. So the 11 of us started off with dinner at Cafe Vivo in Pavilion. Some of us was too shy to have their pictures on my blog so I’m just going to focus on the ones who weren’t.
That’s Leon and Gin.
And of course Shorty and Ringo.
The food was pretty good. Service though wasn’t as good as the food. After dinner I insisted we go for ice-cream so we went down a couple of floors and had Italian ice-cream at this Gelato parlour just before it closed.
The plan was that after dinner & dessert we would take a walk from Pavilion to Cangkat Bukit Bintang. That was where we wanted to spend our New Year’s Eve. So we got out Pavilion only to see people EVERYWHERE on the streets of Bukit Bintang.
I had never seen Bukit Bintang this packed before in my life. The roads were flooded with people so much that 3 lanes for cars became 2 or even 1 lanes. Cars had to move very slowly past the crowd. A number of people in the crowd were walking around armed with those sprays that spray out snow like stuff. People were running around spraying at one another though they left the innocent passerbys like us alone. Except for one guy who saw Ringo and thought to himself “Hey that’s a nicely dressed up girl, let me mess up her hair with this” and gave Ringo a good spraying.
Lucky for Ringo he only managed to get a bit on to her hair but that was enough to piss her off. I took a picture of Ringo and she looked sad on the outside but I can tell on the inside she was burning with rage.
You don’t mess with a girl’s hair… you just don’t.
We took some 20 minutes trying to squeeze through Bukit Bintang to get to Cangkat. My friends were worried. They thought the crowd was really rowdy and they wanted to break out of there as soon as they could. I on the other hand…. perhaps naive as a child, thought that it was amazing. I loved the atmosphere there. I mean there’s only that once in a year where everyone would come out and hang out in the open like that… all waiting for a countdown. Everyone was smiling and happy!
Besides there were a lot of cops around to make sure nobody did anything violent or over the top. The cops even sent their K-9 unit equipped with a dog so big that everyone couldn’t help but stare.
Shorty described it more as a wolf. Shorty likes big dogs anyway. When talking about dogs, I always said I would like a small cute dog that ran around the house but Shorty always wanted a dog big enough for her to put on a saddle on it and ride it.
As dangerous as everyone thought the crowd was, it obviously wasn’t dangerous enough for us to stop and take pictures there.
After a long struggle we finally reached Cangkat. The street on Cangkat was busy but relatively more quiet and felt safer than it was at the adjacent Bukit Bintang.
All the outlets there seemed to be having this huge Heineken party people have been tweeting about.
So we chose Little Havana owned by someone we happened to know. We sat down and we ordered some Heineken while we hung out and waited for the fireworks.
They gave us this neat little Heineken bottle opener. Gin loved it and wanted to take it home so badly so we conceited it to him.
At the end of the night though I think he FORGOT to bring it back because I didn’t see him carrying it. All that fuss Gin… all that effort and you forgot to bring it back!
Then came the 2 minutes before midnight. Someone in the bar announced that there was about a minute left to the countdown so everyone got ready to count the last 10 seconds down. Just before it happened though we heard a loud bang and the sky lit up. Further down Cangkat, they had already released some Fireworks to usher in the New Year. So we skipped the countdown and everyone in Cangkat ran out of the bars and stood on the street to watch the Fireworks. It was simple, probably not as elaborate as the one in Dataran Merdeka or something but it was good enough.
All we need for New Year’s Eve is good company… and fireworks. So that was how we spent the New Year’s Eve of 2010.
Happy New Year everyone. From Shorty and me.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space