Our day started off on the wrong foot, the alarm went off at 7 – it wasn’t supposed to.  We woke up groggy and confused – it was supposed to be a lie-in day but Col had mistakenly ‘snoozed’ it instead of turning it off the previous day.  He got up and pottered around while I snoozed for another hour or so.

I checked my email downstairs before leaving for the day, only to discover that the sister of an old friend of mine had died.  She’d been battling with sickness for a while now – and she put up a long, honourable fight but she lost it in the end.  It was a shock, a sad start to the day and left a little cloud over my head – making me miss my own sister.

Rest in Peace Natalie Dunks, I enjoyed penpalling with you and I’m glad your big sister suggested we write to each other like she and I write.  You’ll be missed x

We got the monorail to KL central and picked up a mcMuffin for breakfast (sorry Magz!) and did the ‘airport shuffle’ once again, the monorail-train-bus thing to get us to the track.

There was, most definitely, a lot more people there than there had been the previous day – both on the transportation devices and at the track.  I guess people like watching something that has consequence.

We went to the main part of the track first, to drop off the RM30 that we owed the cafe from the previous day for our water.  The people that were working, had no idea why we were handing them money and were very confused why we didn’t expect food in return.  It took a couple of tries but we got the message across – I think!

We then embarked on the task of trying to get to our gate! There was no signs or people directing, no instructions – it was an ask and get blank looks, jump on a bus and hope for the best! LOL!

We finally figured it out, in spite of a random Brit couple convincing us that our stop wasn’t our stop so we had to do 2 full loops of the track on two separate busses – but we forgave them as we were all learning the ropes and we got there eventually!

We scaled the hill to our stand, picked up water and food and took our seats.  As it turned out, the food was freezing cold (not in the ‘its how Asia eats food’ kind of way, in the, I’m not sure this was cooked after it came out of the fridge kind of way! LOL!) and Col’s had an ant in it – so we abandoned, got a refund and starved all afternoon as it was the only food on our side of the track!

We watched the Malaysian Super Series race before Quali, there was a huge accident from the starting grid – thankfully the driver got out ok – but most of the race took place behind a safety car and through the F1 pits.

They also had a wee Fiat 500 in the race which the crowd got behind and cheered hugely each time it passed them.

Quali was pretty good, Lewis set a 1m 35 flat, then beat his own time and then that *insert any number of expletives here* Vettel came out with practically no time left on the clock and set fastest lap – stealing poll.

We waited about 15 minutes before we went to get the bus back – we thought the crowds would clear a bit first. So we took some track pics!

However, they didn’t.  The transportation was awful, we waited in the scorching heat for an hour to get the first bus – the internal bus to take us back to the main carpark.

Once we got to the main car park, we had another hour and a half wait for the bus from the main car park to the airport – with no water available, complimentary or otherwise.

The train was totally packed, so we ended up standing for the 40 minute train ride back to KL Central.  By the time we got to the hotel, we were exhausted, sore and hot as hell!

The only upside to the insane waiting, was the fact we ended up meeting two English couples while we were in the long bus queue at the main car park.  An older couple and a younger couple – the later couple, I’d seen before on the monorail.

Seriously interesting people, the younger couple got laid off from Orange and took redundancy packages – with which they are doing a 6-7 week trip to the far east, including the Malaysian GP.  The older couple, the man especially was so friendly and we chatted for, quite literally, hours.

Back at the hotel, we decided ‘screw it’ and headed back to the Italian – Villa Danieli.  I guess the test of a good restaurant is how they cope with a Saturday night service.  It wasn’t even all that busy, but the service was slow, we had to ask for bread, they got our order wrong (we asked for chicken in our pasta and got tomatoes) got our order
wrong (asked for chicken in our pasta but got tomatoes) then, they tried to charge us RM45 ($13) EACH for ‘special pasta order’ on top a RM30 ‘fee’ of some kind,  as well as the original RM38 for the pasta – are you kidding me?  I called over the floor manager and told him they got our order wrong and we weren’t paying the additional fees.

Dinner was delicious, albeit slow and they weren’t so on the ball! We didn’t have dessert this time, and as it turned out, diet coke was cheaper than water but only by about $2 a tin! AGH! We still paid something like $5 a tin!!!

Back at the hotel room, we got in to our pjs, ordered ice and watched the AI results (AGAIN!).  The ice never came…(what kind of hotel doesn’t have ice makers on every few floors at least?!) we spent a while watching TV while I made notes on the day, pulled pictures and passed out!