Ask Melvin Ng

All in it was a really fun and enjoyable trip. It was the first time that I was traveling that far, and it was over 20 hours of flight.

During my stay in the United States, I was in San Francisco mostly but also took a 7 Day Tour that covered Yosemite National Park, Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Disneyland and Universal Studios.

We also had lots of fun enjoying the great food there! No wonder I came home with a few extra kilos.

On the way back to Malaysia, we stopped over at Taipei for 2 days.

Am I glad to be back home. How I missed chillies, curries, nasi lemak, nasi briyani, bak kut teh, shar koey teow….mmmmmmmmmm.

We went to Universal Studios the following day after Disneyland. It was fun, but relatively, I still prefer Disneyland.

Did I tell you that Homer and Bart Simpson are my buddies?

Can I get a discount puhleeeeeeeeeeezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz??????????

We went for a bus ride tour of the ‘behind the scenes’ of the Hollywood studios. This is one stage where the current popular hit series, Heroes, was filmed.

This is a carnage from the movie, War Of The World.

It’s eating me alive! HEEEEELLLLLLLPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!

Chilling out waiting for the Blues show to start and the next one waiting for the Waterworld performance.

We were at Disneyland for a day and I truly enjoyed it. I guess it’s reminiscence of my childhood times. A night scene shot of the Disneyland castle. Unfortunately, the fireworks weren’t on that night due to unfavorable wind condition. Otherwise it would have been a sight to behold.

The parade was fun with lots of dancing and singing.

I have to really give credit to the Aladdin show as it was reallyyyyyyyy funny! and the jokes were very up-to-date. The genie was the favorite.

All in, the rides were fun and awesome. Can’t wait to visit the Disneyland in Orlando. I’m sure that would be an even better experience.

When we first arrived in San Francisco, we had high expectations… and one of the first mean we had on our first night was at this diner. The food was just awesome and yummy, partly because it was our first meal and partly because we were really hungry.

The 3 of us shared our meal, and we had meatloaf, spaghetti, and turkey meat. Ah…glorious food. We truly enjoyed that first meal.

The next morning, and many times more during our stay in the US, we had fast food, burgers, burgers and more burgers and fast food - from Carl’s Junior, In and Out, Del Taco, Subway, etc. Now that I’m back in Malaysia, I’ve had enough fast food and burgers to last me for a month. I’ll abstain if you don’t mind. One more burgers and I might just throw up….*burp*.

Nevertheless, I did enjoyed those burgers and fries. It’s just different from here. Their meat patty is tastier, they have yummy bacon strips, and the best part about the In and Out burgers and fries is that they are all fresh. Meaning if you ordered the fries, they would start cutting up the potato and fry them, unlike Mc Donalds which has everything prepared in advance and frozen.

One of the good thing about our stay at the San Francisco Marriott Airport was that we discovered a nice restaurant tucked about few hundred metres away. "The Elephant Bar" was one of our favorite restaurants and I think we had 3-4 meals over there.

How about a nice refreshing alcoholic mix…and we the desserts there simply looked delicious so we can’t help it but to order this sinful brownie with whipped cream and ice cream. I’m still salivating at the mere mention of it.

That pork ribs above, it was just so juicy and tender that Gobala and I were fighting over every piece…I was just being dramatic over the fighting. You’ve got to try it to ‘experience’ it. It was even better than the ribs I had at Tony Roma’s Singapore outlet.

Sometime during out stay in SF, we hired a car from Hertz, and drove to Gilroy for shopping. Vince did some research and apparently they have one of the biggest outlet stores so we just simply had to go.

Lunch time came and since we’ve had enough of fast food for awhile, we hopped in to this Mexican restaurant. Oh my…the menu looks confusing so we just asked the owner to ’surprise’ us with his recommendation.

Taaadaaaaaa!!!

The chef whipping up some concoction to be served with the nachos. It was very creamy and it wasn’t surprising considering the amount of avocado it has inside

How about some margaritas, senor? Oh yeah!

All the above were to be wrapped in tapas and how can Mixican dish go without rice and beans. It was just so yummy but we were too stuffed to finish up everything.

That’s a refreshing dessert drink to finish off the meal. It has rice water, milk and some cinnamon powder. Very light, sweet and refreshing way of ending a hearty meal.

Can’t help not including this photo of 3 Musketeers as the name has a semblance to the 3 of us making our way to the United States.

On our flight home, we had to transit in Taipei so we decided to stop-over for 2 nights. It took some getting used to because of the weather. It was hot and humid and I had headache for the 2 days that I was there. The jet lag didn’t help either due to the 15 hours time difference.

We only went to a few places while we were there. In fact, it was a stop-over which we shouldn’t have made.

This is Taipei 101, currently the tallest completed skyscraper.

At night, we went to the Shnlin night market. There have a few night markets there but Shinlin is purpotedly to be the biggest of them all. We just had to try the street food over there. Some tasted good, but some needs having to get use to.

Apparently the food stall below was selling fermented beancurd but since I can’t read Chinese, I wasn’t aware of it. However, it’s not as bad as in Malaysia because at least I couldn’t smell them. Oh boy, the smell is certainly an acquired taste.

The weather’s scorching hot and humid to visit any place. Nevertheless, we braved the heat and went out shopping for some local produce as well as to the Sun Yat Sen memorial hall.