This was my first roadtrip to Kedah. Usually, "roadtrips" for me means 4-hour drive to my kampong in JB. Kedah is even further away from KL as compared to JB so this recent roadtrip took us about 5 hours! Can't imagine people driving back to Kedah during festive seasons. Just an advice -- save up some money for a plane ticket. Haha.
So finally, after the long drive, we arrived in Alor Setar. The wedding was held at Ukir Mall. It's a handicraft mall + hall for weddings & special events. It was a nice wedding, the emcee was not bad. He could make people laugh and the next moment make people cry. The power of psychology :-)
Here's a photo of the bride & groom which I managed to capture. The groom, Suhail, was our classmate in Uniten. The best man, Hafzan, was also our classmate and the bridesmaid, Aisyah, was my housemate during second year :-)
After the wedding, we checked in to Hotel Grand Continental. We booked through booking.com. We trusted this website. We booked the hotel for our Stockholm trip through this site and the entire process was hassle-free and the hotel turned out to be amazing. No such luck this time. Yes, the price for Grand Continental was reasonable and the reviews seemed OK. But the actual state of the hotel was very much different compared to those photos posted on booking.com!
It was an old hotel. Really, really old. It's like one of those hotels you see in Pudu.
OK, the photos do not really reflect how old the hotel is. The last photo -- we prefered to keep the curtains closed at all time because this is the "breathtaking" view we got if we look outside:
The bathroom was similar to the one back at my hostel in Uniten:
Even though the toilet looked like a hostel toilet, the hot shower was working fine and I was so grateful for that!!!
Another bad thing about the hotel was that -- no joke -- there was no power socket to charge your gadgets! I had to move the cabinet a bit and unplug the refrigerator so that I could charge my phone:
On top of that, Celcom coverage in Alor Setar was reallyyy bad so I had no Internet access and got stuck watching Planet of the Apes on Fox Movies. By the way, Fox Movies was the only interesting channel available there.
For dinner, Mr.Y and I planned to find Mee Abu but Waze betrayed us and we couldn't find the place. We wanted to try the local food but there were only stalls, no proper restaurants so we ended up eating Domino's pizza.
The next day, we had breakfast at the hotel. On our way to the lift, there was an awful smell in the hotel corridor because a guest left a bunch of room-service food leftovers outside their room and none of the hotel staffs clean it up. Yuck.
As expected, breakfast at the hotel's coffeehouse was disappointing. The only thing I could swallow was baked beans. The fried rice, fried noodles and other food were horrible.
After breakfast, we immediately drove back to KL. Once we arrived, we had ayam penyet for lunch. Goooooood foooooood....
Note: Parking at the hotel was very limited. I wonder how they can cater for guest parking during peak season...
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