The highlight of my Ipoh trip, Foh San’s dim sum at ungodly hour, 8.30am. The dim sum was one of the reasons why I took all the trouble to travel from Malacca to this small town of Perak.

While we were waiting for a table, a guy came up to me and said he recognized me from my blog and reads my blog. Ha! I didn’t get his name, but he certainly made my day. Thanks dude!

No names, no description, no review but just pictures, pictures and more pictures. Got to love the amount of fresh and succulent prawns they put inside each dim sum.

There were Niki, Ivy, Sam, Sharmila, Ian and myself and that’s all we had. I recalled my last trip to Ipoh with my two buddies, we had way more than that even though there were only three of us.

Our friend was a wee bit too lazy to drive around searching for a parking lot and chose to park right in front of Foh San instead. For that, he was given a summon and he sure didn’t look sad at all. Heh!

It was the closing “ceremony” for the workshop where the kids have to wrap up everything before being reviewed by both Niki and Ivy.

After all the formalities, it was bidding farewell and pictures taking time. Some of the kids were kind enough to come up to me and ask for a picture; for a brief moment right there, I felt like a star celebrity, with all the flashes firing at us. I am that shallow. Ha! After all, most of the time, I am on the other side of the camera.

Senior brat, Sandra Tan.

Brat, Joy Tan. What’s with the hair covering half of the face huh? :P

Senior brat, Stanley Liew who takes really nice picture.

With some of the brats.

I also got myself another BRATs T-shirt, apart from the one I have (and still keeping in my closet) from my workshop back in 2000. Sadly, I couldn’t wear it. Niki, make bigger size can or not so that people like me and Leong can wear too! :P

While the kids were to have their lunch at the hotels, we headed out to town, specifically, dai shu geok for some yong tau fu before heading back to KL.

Mixed fruit punch, damn nice and refreshing for a hot day.

The crowd was huge as it was lunch hour. Everybody was queuing up at the counter, picking their favourite assortments of yong tau fu such as brinjals, lady fingers, tau fu (Duh!), eggs, turnips, bean curd skin and fish balls. Take whatever you want, put it in the bowl, tell the lady at the counter the kind of noodles you want and wait for your food to arrive at your table. No frills.

Niki, with his iPhone, tweeting.

My bowl of yong tau fu. While it still can’t beat my mum’s pork and fish (hakka style) yong tau fu, it is definitely far superior and delicious than most yong tau fu that I had so far, especially those in Malacca. I didn’t like the noodles though.

One for the album.

How could we head back to KL without having the famous Funny Mountain tau fu fah right? Best of all, we didn’t even need to get down from our car as they provide drive through service where they would deliver your bowl of tau fu fah and glass of soy milk to your car.

The smoothest tau fu fah ever.

We headed back to KL after that and saw an accident that probably just happened five to 10 minutes before we passed by them.

All in all, it was a short, fun and relaxing trip. While I didn’t get to eat the many Ipoh food that I wanted to, I have at least got my hands on the baked salted chicken, Foh San’s dim sum and tau fu fah. I should have persuaded them to go for Ipoh white coffee at old town on the second day.

During dinner, Ivy and Niki both suggested that I give a talk to the kids on any topics that I like. Who am I to give a talk in front of two reputable editors like Ivy Soon and Niki Cheong right?

I managed to avoid doing so during BRATs Malacca workshop earlier this March but this time, they were dead serious about it (me giving a talk) as Niki introduced me to the kids after his session.

Not knowing what to do talk about, I shared my knowledge what I know about food tasting/reviewing as the kids would be doing their own for tomorrow’s assignment. I wasn’t well prepared prepared at all, hence, I just mentioned whatever that came into my mind at that particular time while Ivy (who writes a lot about food too) would add on / help me here and there.

Photo credits to Sam Tham.

Just as I thought I was done, Ivy raised the topic of blogging, which I then shared my blogging journey, tips on blog contents, making money through blogs, getting more hits and higher traffic and etc. with the kids. I was definitely more comfortable with this topic as I have been blogging for four years. The fact that Ivy and Niki aren’t avid bloggers themselves sort of ease the pressure on me as well.

Photo credits to Sam Tham.

When Niki asked them who had visited/read my blog, to my surprise, there were actually about four out of the 36 kids raised their hands. That’s 10%! Ha! I was expecting none actually.

BRAT Alexander was the first to recognize me, asking me whether I was JasonMumbles as I looked very much like him. I said yes and he followed by a sentence that gave me the WTF (in a good way) moment with cold sweat coming out like those in manga/Japanese comic.

Photo credits to Sam Tham.

I ended my sharing session after that, with me having stomachache due to nervousness. Serious! I dislike public speaking.

The kids went back to work on their video, slides and stories after the session was adjourned while we, the workshop facilitators, went out for supper at Tong Sui Gai (Dessert Street?).

Pardon the pictures, they were taken in a very hasty manner.

Lin chee kang, which Ivy condemned a lot while I happily drank it. It may not be the most authentic lin chee kang but I still like it because there’s a lot of ginkgo nuts.

Grass jelly and other condiments.

ABC, that didn’t look appetizing at all.

Curry noodles with yong tau fu, meat balls and bean curds. This bowl of curry noodles packed more uuummmppphhh than the one I had during dinner.

That was my first day at Ipoh with the youth desk and BRATs. Stay tune as we went to Perak’s royal town, Kuala Kangsar for another round of street interviews for the BRATs and eating for the facilitators the next day.

My trip to Ipoh was a very sudden and impromptu one.

I was surfing around Facebook when I saw The Star’s photographer Sam Tham mentioned that she was in Ipoh for BRATs workshop, together with the Youth Desk (Niki Cheong, Ian Yee, Ivy Soon and Sharmila Nair).

After some pleading, taunting, daring and offers being thrown around at 6.30pm on Wednesday, I was already boarding the 8.30pm bus to KL followed by the 7.30am bus to Ipoh. It was that sudden.

I reached Ipoh approximately 10am and Leong from the marketing department came to pick me up. The BRATs were already preparing to head out for their street polls at Jusco and Ipoh Parade respectively.

After putting down my stuffs, off we went to the malls. The kids did their stuffs, terrorizing poor students and shoppers, while I was busy drooling at the SYTs walking past me.

While the kids were to have their lunch at the hotel, we (Niki, Ivy, Ian, Sam, Leong, Sharmila and I) headed down to Yong Suan Coffee Shop for Nasi Ganja.

The queue was rather long and there were no empty tables as it was peak hour. It’s an interesting sight to see as there were Chineses, Malays and Indians all eating the same food under one roof. On top of that, the one managing the drink station was a Chinese family. Definitely fits the definition of muhibbah.

There were not many dishes for me to choose from but I settled for a piece of fried chicken and stingray.

The boss grabbed some cucumbers and chutney before pouring spoonful of chicken curry onto the rice. After looking at how the man prepared my plate of Nasi Ganja that was no different than a pile of leftovers all put into the same plate, I lost half of my appetite.

I have to say that it tasted much better than it looked. The curry was the bomb, not just spicy but hot and could really numb your taste bud after awhile; been sometime since I last ate such spicy curry since my mum stopped cooking.

Two thumbs up for the flavour and taste, but none for the preparation and presentation.

I had caramel pudding for dessert. The custard didn’t taste too strongly of egg but a tad hard for a pudding and caramel was on the watery side as well.

For the next couple of hours, it was work (writing their stories, editing their video and etc.) for the kids but rest and slack for us.

That’s me and Sam, chilling out while waiting for dinner time to arrive.

It was raining when we headed out for dinner, so we had to settle for a food court.

Sotong and kangkung tossed in peanut sauce. Too little peanuts with watered down peanut sauce; at least, the squid wasn’t over cooked and tasted pretty good.

Supposedly famous and delicious deep fried mantis prawn but tasted just average to me. Deep fried prawns are nice when the prawns are huge and fresh, best if the shells are retained to prevent the prawns from “shrinking” while being deep fried.

Deep fried baby crabs. No kick at all, give me those fully grown and matured mud crab instead.

Char kueh teow with prawns. It wasn’t mine but Niki’s.

Lala in ginger sauce. The lalas were rather huge and most importantly, fresh.

Shells? Snails? Whatever.

Supposedly famous laksa / curry noodles. This was down right disappointing.

Chee cheong fun with char siew and prawns.

My clay pot chicken rice, which I thought was pretty decent and tasted rather good. Although not every grain of rice was covered with dark soy sauce / gravy, it was still flavourful as the rice wine brought the best out of it. I even poured all the ginger sauce from the lala dish into my pot of rice. There were pieces of lap cheong and salted fish as well.

Bloody cockles (pun intended). Too raw for me but Sam and Ivy enjoyed them.

One for the album, without Niki Cheong.

Meanwhile, over the table during dinner…

Ivy, “Jason, you should give a talk to the kids.”

Niki, “Yeah. Talk about anything, 10-15 minutes will do.”

Me, “What?!” *stares blankly*

To be continued…