Happy Chinese New Year from Colin and SiewPeng! :D  May the year of dragon brings you great health, happiness and prosperity!

We have taken our picture with the golden dragon at Sunway Pyramid.   The decorations are fantastic.

Unlike previous years we have taken the pictures of the cat statue in Kuching, this year we are enjoying a quiet Chinese New Year in KL and we have just visited some of the largest shopping malls.

Lots of people were taking their pictures with the golden dragon too!

There are effects like smoke.  Take a look at the dragon’s tail closely.  At random times, the smoke comes out from the dragon’s nose.

This is the dragon’s head.  The art work is nice and meticulous.

Opposite the golden dragon is a Chinese pagoda.

This is how the pagoda looks like from the top.

This is a larger view opposite the golden dragon.

There are fire balls hanging down from the center of the roof.

Inside the mall, there is a place for ice skating.  The red lanterns are above the skaters.

Before we left, we took some pictures outside Sunway Pyramid.

The side view of Sphinx.

As we walked further, we found a small roundabout decorated with lanterns, beautiful lights and flowers.

Lots of peach blossoms.

We went to Pavillion at Bukit Bintang earlier this month, and we found a huge dragon there.

Colin, SiewPeng and the huge dragon at Pavillion, KL.

Once we entered the mall, there were children singing Chinese New Year songs on the stage.

Outside Pavillion, Bukit Bintang.

A few days before, we went to The Gardens Mall and found these cylinder lanterns.

Instead of setting up the dragon statue, Midvalley Megamall used paper cutting lanterns, which is really nice and big and I think it is not an easy job to set them up though it seems easier than the dragon statue.  If you look closely, the patterns on the lanterns were cut and pieces of patterns were then stapled together.

And by the way, lantern in Mandarin has the same sound as dragon, which is ‘Loong’.

SiewPeng with the Sphinx statue with red ribbon (decoration for Chinese New Year).

And here we are again.

Wishing everyone all the best in the year of Dragon!

Happy Deepavali to those who are celebrating the Festival of Lights, especially to the Indian community in Malaysia.  :)

This is the first time in my life I have a public holiday for Deepavali in Malaysia.  Previous years I was in East Malaysia where it is not a public holiday.

I have visited KL for quite a few times in the past, but have never come during this festive season.  I am surprised to find that there are Kolam(s) in all of the shopping malls I have just been to recently.

Instead of 3D decorations (which can usually be seen in shopping malls), this time I saw a 2D decoration.

Kolam is a type of painting painted with coloured rice powder.

I noticed that most of them have peacocks as their theme.

Some of these decorations are labeled as Rangoli.  I don’t really know about their differences.

There are 2 separate entries in wikipedia on Rangoli and Kolam.  From what I understand, Kolam is a type of Rangoli?  Correct me if it is wrong.

Other Deepavali decorations at a shopping mall.

I thought of going to Batu Caves (KL) today, and see how crowded it is but I have other plans.  I recalled someone told me that it will be more crowded during Thaipusam.

I will wait for SiewPeng to join me in KL and we are going to visit Batu Caves during the festive season, and I am sure that we will have a true life experience on how crowded it is.

I believe that there might still have a comfortable space between people so that visitors can still move around even it seems very crowded from the pictures (same thing as a picture of a crowded shopping mall), compared to the space on KTM train (city route) where the space on the train is sometimes zero or negative (terribly squeezed among human).

Once again, Happy Deepavali to everyone.

I like the shape of these trees because they seemed like dancing in the wind.

The power cable is distracting, I can crop it, but I don’t want to miss out some parts of the cloud.

Some other trees with the sun ray.

This is a big tree on a piece of open land, I can see mountains, a communication tower and again trees far away in the background, can you?

Coconut trees in this area gave me a kampung (which means village) feel.

If I am not mistaken, these are palm trees.

Again, each of them are unique.

Coming up next, I will show you the mysterious clouds which created the beautiful sun ray.

What attracted me to take such a lot of photos of the view from the ETA train window was because of this ray of the sun coming out from the cloud in a downward fan-shaped.

The train was moving at top speed, and it passed through endless of power poles.

Huge power poles are my favorites.

The pole block the sun from my camera, and there was a bird flying over.

At this moment, the sun was almost fully covered, I found that reduce 2 stops on exposure gave me more detailed on the semi transparent cloud.

These might not be the most beautiful photos, but each of them are unique.

Next, I am going to show you the tree photos taken when we were on the ETS train.

There are 7 mountains in this area.

Let me analyze what direction I am facing.

We were on a train from north (Ipoh) to south (KL), and we were sitting on the left windows of the train.

A geography question, can you guess what is the direction from us to this mountain?

The answer is East.  (However, it might not exactly be on the East, if the train was not exactly on the North-South direction)

We don’t have a chance to see sun rises from these multi layer of mountain, but I believe the sunset must be beautiful.