Oh my God I have never seen Col so excited in all the time I have known him!

He was up at the crack of dawn – hours before our wake up call.  I slept a little longer, but excitement kept me from sleeping in much later.  We were out the door by 7.30am and straight to the Monorail, bound for KL Central – we said we’d eat at KL central (the train station that took us to the airport), but, when we got there – we had no time to eat and just hopped on the train to the airport.  From the airport, you hop a shuttle to the track’s main car park.  We dandered up to the welcome centre where we picked up our tickets from Will Call – pretty hassle free in fact! It was a much easier process than we thought it’d be!

Our 4 bottles of hotel-water were removed from us at the front gate.  I should have taken a picture of the piles of bottles each day, just sitting at the gate – and the boxes of food etc too lol!

When we got inside, we picked up a little tub of melon and a bottle of OJ and since no one was checking tickets, we were able to walk around each area of the track taking pictures and watching the cars whizz by.

At some stage, we realised that we had no debit card, worse than that, we had very little cash and nowhere that served food or sold water took credit card (hell, the merchandise stands barely took credit card!).

We shared a lunch of fish’n’chips in the cafe – which was lovely, but we were starving (remember the no-breakfast thing!) so it didn’t go very far at all!

We did some shopping after lunch, the merch stands took credit cards – though, they had to run them twice or three times.  Col got a shirt, tshirt, hat, I got 2 tops and a hat, we also got a huge umberdoodle and a lanyard – yes, expensive day but since we’d not spent much on the whole trip (aside from feeding ourselves) and were saving ourselves for track shopping, so we didn’t care so much! LOL!

Went to K1 to take pictures – for those of you not in the F1 ‘know’ that’s the first corner.  Where people get the highest chance of watching a crash I suppose…

Anyways, Col managed to charm a restaurant lady into giving us 6 bottles of water and promised to pay her back the next day.  She tried to run his card a few times and empathised, she’d been in our position before with no cash to hand and no water so she took pity on us and let us have liquid – which was good cause otherwise we’d have had to leave early!

We ended up leaving early anyways though, as we had no $ for food, we were really, pretty hungry, and the pit lane walk through was at the very end of the day, so any F1 peeps would probably have been long gone by then!

The journey back to the hotel was a wet one! (hooray for the new umbrella!), we had RN5 left in cash and the tickets were 5 exactly – thank God for small mercies, eh?!

We decided to have food here in the hotel – the heat and the amount of walking, coupled with the early starts had left us drained and there’s no where particularly nearby to the hotel to eat (unless you wanna get a taxi or take a train somewhere else).

The Chinese restaurant’s menu was pretentious and filled with weird and wacky seafood – not for us! So we decided to try the Italian restaurant, Villa Danieli.

OMG am I glad we made that choice or what?  Some of the BEST Italian food I’ve ever had! We ordered a tagliatelle with Alfredo sauce – we wanted them to add chicken, but were told they couldn’t.  However, when they brought our food out, they had put chicken in with the pasta (going by the following night’s experience, we’re seriously lucky they did it for free!).

We also ordered a pizza, bacon and mushroom to share and enjoyed some  lovely bread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar (which reminded me of my friends Becky and Matt in Manchester!).  The food was DELISH!!

The portions were also small enough that we could squeeze in a dessert, I ordered crepes suzette for dessert and Col got tiramasu (I hate coffee and Tirimasu but I LOVED his dessert!).  Although it was an upper class restaurant and was fairly expensive (it was about $80), it was the drinks cost that really pissed us off!  They charge an insane amount for a bottle of water – no, I’m not kidding – $8 per bottle!!! and they add a 16% tax/fee on to the cheque, which sucks, but it was delicious and meant I didn’t need to move from the hotel, so again – we didn’t care!

‘It’s our honeymoon’ was a commonly used phrase to justify spending a little more than we normally would on things! LOL!

When we got back to the hotel room we tried on our new clothes (Col particularly loved my new McLaren shirts and we watched the American Idol shocker results before konking out for the night!