Argentina, Banana Leaf Rice & Malaysia

L to R: Oscar, Angie and Ruben

I met Ruben while on Bunaken Island last month.

To those of you who love to travel, Ruben is leading THE life - he's on a backpacking trip around Asia.

Like many Mat Sallehs who are mystified with the East and everything to do with it, Ruben spent 6 months in India studying meditation and yoga. In fact before coming to KL, he was in Malacca for 2 weeks studying wai tan kung.

During the Malaysian leg of his travels, Ruben's brother Oscar flew into KL to follow him discover the wonders of this multi-racial country. The brothers are from Argentina.

Whilst in KL, Angie and I brought them for a banana leaf rice dinner at Nirwana's Restaurant in Bangsar (where else! It's our fav banana leaf rice joint!).

I think everyone enjoyed their meal because this is how our table looked like after we had done justice to the rice, vege and chicken.

Whacked clean!

After dinner we continued sitting at the table despite a few people standing around waiting for us to scram (how evil we are!). We exchanged travel stories and about life in Malaysia and Argentina.

Ruben told us about the poor economy in Argentina resulting in many Argentinians moving to Spain to build a life there. Argentina became independent from Spain in 1810. So I guess that's why Spanish is the official language in Argentina and not 'Argentinian' as what some simple-minded folks would think, lol.

Btw, Ruben and Oscar were charged RM10 by an unscrupulous taxi driver to drive them from the Bangsar LRT station to the restaurant which is only about 1km away. That's daylight robbery!

We could have easily given them directions to walk to the restaurant. But we didn't want them to sesat (get lost) being foreigners who are not familiar with Bangsar.

Malaysian taxi drivers prey on foreigners to make a fast ringgit and the government ain't doing anything 'bout it.