August is an eventful month for me as I moved out of the hostel inside the campus and shared an apartment with a housemate, started cooking my own meals (I barely cook before) and officially began the tough journey of Final Year Project (FYP) before graduation. It's normal to feel reluctant to leave the comfort zone of your carefree lifestyle where you don't have to worry about utilities (unlimited electricity, water and wifi in campus hostel), food, personal safety and so on, but I had been looking forward to move out ever since a year ago due to the attractive freedom that I would be getting outside the campus. So here I am, sitting in my extra small room writing this blog post using 4 mbps Streamyx while watching Popcorn the fearless hamster roaming freely around.
Since I am really busy about FYP (you can see that I have not been updating the blog for about one month) that I have no mental capacity for writing, I would like to compile a summary for August! I hope that every month I can make such a summary to remind myself how wonderful my life has been for the past one month and for this month, I want to feature Roof Talk Theme Hostel, Grandma Ong Pan Mee Restaurant and a book titled The Girl with All the Gifts.
My FYP sampling trip was conducted in Merambong, Johor, which led me to this hostel located 30-minute drive away from the sampling site. I have stayed in a few backpacker hostels before, and this one is the most convenient of all in terms of facilities and location.
The facilities provided including non-attached bathroom with hot shower (towel and shampoo provided too), hair dryer, ironing facility, washing machine (with a charge), rooftop to hang your clothes, pantry with a fridge (unlimited coffee all day long), leisure area with a TV and some board games, basically everything you need for a stay if you are going for a trip or vacation. The environment is clean and people are friendly. Most importantly, the price is pretty reasonable for student like me with free self-service breakfast every morning. For lunch and dinner, there are quite a few cheap vegetarian or vegan restaurant within walking distance, so there is no worries of food choices at all! There are also Tesco and Giant if you need to buy daily necessities. This hostel is located in Johor Bahru where Legoland and Malaysia-Singapore Second Link is quite near, but I had not explored much during my stay because the duration was short and I had work to be done.
I will definitely stay there again if I go to Johor Bahru!
Pan mee is one of the food that I feel reluctant to give up as I have lots of good memories related to this dish since I first came to Selangor. Most traditional pan mee is served with anchovies soup, so it is difficult to get a vegan version one. However, I came across this regular pan mee restaurant which ALSO provides vegetarian or vegan version! You can imagine how delightful I was when I saw that option in their menu!
As shown in the photo above, there are seven types of noodles to choose from, and they also have special noodles made with tomato, spinach or beetroot (this one was still not available during my visit)! I have tried the ones made with tomato and spinach respectively, and they were so so good. People would have the assumption that vegetarian or vegan version of food especially those traditional ones will not be as good, but the pan mee they serve would blow your mind. The soup was sweet and satisfying, totally something I needed after a long day of sampling. Honestly speaking, this was the first vegan pan mee that I have ever tried, and it is the best one for now unless I have tasted even better ones in the future. It really makes me happy when a restaurant cares enough to provide a vegetarian or vegan version of food for customers.
Hopefully I can have a leisure trip to this place again and one of the motives will be eating at Grandma Ong's pan mee!
The trailer of a movie is often the key to influence the anticipation of people towards its release or even to attract new fans if it is something new. However, this one movie trailer had led me to the original book - The Girl with All the Gifts. I love supernatural stuff and superpower, this title already attracted my attention. SPOILER ALERT! I spent three days reading this book, so maybe you should read it first or watch the movie in September unless you don't mind a bit of spoiler.
I have never liked movies about zombie apocalypse or about disasters and end of the world etc. as there is no way the storyline can lead to anything...meaningful? The only time that I have ever watched a zombie apocalypse movie was accidental, who would know Maze Runner 2 has zombies in it!!! The Girl with All the Gifts is actually about a zombie apocalypse happening due to a type of fungus which could hijack humans' brain and nervous system, instead of the usual infection caused by virus in other zombie apocalypses. The scary thing about this is that the fungus named Ophiocordyceps unilateralis does exist in Nature, where it goes around infecting ants and manipulating their mind. In this novel, a group of infected children were kept like prisoners to be studied by scientists, because even though they were infected, they still had conscience and intelligence, unlike other adult mindless zombies. Everyone knows what would happen in a zombie apocalypse, but in this one, the one who caused troubles were uninfected humans. I highly recommend you to read the novel (since the movie is not out yet) and do tell me your thoughts. The ending was a bit disappointing and did not make sense to me, but overall it's a good read.
This is the trailer of the movie. I wonder why they changed the skin colour of the main character though.
That's all for today's post, hope you have a wonderful August as well! ^^