More on Kuala Lumpur

I'm starting my stories with the end of the trip because it was only a couple of days so I have a lot less photos and a lot less to tell. =) Probably after this I'll post things rather chronologically.

Besides what I've posted here, you can find the rest of my photos from Kuala Lumpur on my Flickr page.

Kuala Lumpur was the first Asian city I've been to and I think it was a good one to start out with since the language is relatively easy (not in another alphabet), people (in the cities at least) speak quite good English, it's multicultural, and I found it safe to walk around as a single woman, even at night, as long as you take the usual precautions with your bag and with avoiding dark alleys. It's a very Muslim country (the mosques broadcast their prayers over loudspeakers), but it felt very modern and not too conservative. The 3 main cultures are Malays (who I found similar to Indonesians), Indians, and Chinese, the Chinese, I imagine, being the main non-Muslim population. Despite it feeling at times like any other Western city, with shops you can find anywhere and English being common and shiny new buildings going up everywhere, it still was like what I imagined Asia to be like, especially in the mad traffic. I don't know how you can learn to drive there, maybe you just have to grow up thinking that driving with pretty much no rules is just the norm. It was a bit insane as well to try to cross the street. At first I tried to wait for the pedestrian lights to go green, but I eventually realized they don't always work, so you just have to go when you have the chance. In the beginning I'd often keep my eye on someone native waiting to cross the street with me and go when they went, but I soon got over my fear and learned when it was good to cross.

Malaysia is a very tropical country. It was like being in one of those tropical plant or bird houses at a zoo, but for real, so the middle of the afternoon was rather intolerable and I was just a puddle of sweat. It would eventually rain almost every afternoon because the sky just couldn't hold any more moisture. Fortunately most storms didn't last too long and then it was a bit fresher in the evening.

There were also different customs there for me to get used to, especially related to hygiene. I think it was customary to wash your hands before eating, so almost every restaurant had a little sink in the corner for this. Some people eat with their hands, using rice to scoop up the meat dish they're eating. They don't seem to use knives as a utensil, so you were only ever given a fork and spoon and I would somehow try to cut a piece of chicken with a spoon. Maybe I was meant to use my hands, but that didn't seem right, so I just kept attacking my chicken in various ways with the fork and spoon I had. Some sort of bidet system was common in nearly all of the toilets. The first toilet I went into, in the airport, had a bit of hose coming out of the wall and I guess you used that if you wanted to. Then I found that some places gave you a choice of toilet to use, either a standard Western toilet, or a squat-over-a-hole toilet. I used one of those in a mall before finding out that the other stalls had normal toilets so I just needed to wait for one of those. Ah, the joys of a foreign country...

My first day there, I didn't really know what to do and I was lacking energy, so I didn't do much besides go to the tourist office and get stuff to help me figure out what to see. During my visit, I spent a silly amount of time in the large mall that was not far from my hotel, at the base of the Petronas Towers. It was air conditioned and there was a large bookstore I liked to browse, so it was good to go to when I was too hot to be outside anymore. That afternoon was the worst thunderstorm while I was there, it lasted for about 2 hours; fortunately I was in my hotel room during it. It was bucketing rain and there was a lot of lightning and thunder. I watched it for awhile, but eventually went to take a nap and was still being woken by big rumbles of thunder. It was still raining that evening when I went to find a place to eat dinner so I got a bit soaked.

The next day I finally got out into the city more. I took the metro to the Chinatown area and wandered around, plus I had a look through the Central Market, which was full of little shops selling souvenirs and cheap stuff, so it was rather touristy, not a cool local market with weird produce and meats for sale. (By the way, though they like their durian, I never saw one there, though large supermarkets in Australia had them for sale. I did see durian chocolates once and was very tempted to get those, if only to try to find out what durians smell like.)

Chinatown was really cool, so many wonderful smells from food being cooked by street vendors or in restaurants and all these very Asian shops and mopeds zooming around and all of that. I made it over to Jalan Petaling (Petaling Street), the main street of Chinatown and basically just walked and walked, checking it all out. There were tons of places down alleys selling food and I sometimes walked through these areas, but I was too afraid to actually order anything there.

By now it was the hottest part of the day and I was soaked with sweat, but on my way back to my hotel, I went to a neighbourhood I read about in the Lonely Planet that was supposed to have more the old-style of Malaysian houses. It was pretty much just across the metro tracks from the Petronas Towers, but the feel of it was light years away from the sparkly, modern Kuala Lumpur that was taking over.

I walked around the neighbourhood and felt horribly out of place. I felt like people were looking at me wondering what wrong turn I took to end up there. A few people were lounging in the heat and it felt rather quiet, like everyone was inside taking a siesta. I went down one little street to get back to the metro station and there was laundry hanging everywhere and chickens running around. I passed this building:

and some kids were playing on the raised part at the front of it. Most of them, when they saw me walking by, freaked out and ran away, but one boy showed he wasn't afraid and he came to the edge of the platform and said hello and smiled. I said hello back and waved, and then he called back to his friends all "it's ok, she's not scary!" so they came over and started calling out hello to me as well. It was really sweet.

I went back to the hotel for awhile and then went back to Chinatown in the evening when there's a night market on Jalan Petaling. It was even more crowded and guys in the market kept wanting to sell me cheap knockoffs of designer bags or sunglasses, but they weren't too pushy and would leave me alone when I said no to them. Adding to the atmosphere were the red lanterns hanging everywhere because it was the run up to the Chinese new year on February 7th. I ended up passing one of the main Hindu temples in the city and I went to the door to have a peek, but it was getting late and the people there were all leaving and turning out the lights. What I saw looked interesting though.

My final day was also the day I left, but my flight wasn't until almost midnight. So I had to leave my hotel room, but then I kept my bags at the hotel and spent the day in the city. I decided to see one of the main Chinese temples and you couldn't get there by public transport, so I took a taxi, which is pretty cheap. Apparently though no one knew where this temple was, so my taxi driver was a bit lost for awhile. I fortunately had a basic map with the temple on it, but we still were driving around a neighbourhood and stopping every once in awhile to ask where it was. Thankfully we found it in the end, though I walked the last bit and thought I might still not find it, but I got to it, fortunately, after going through all that trouble. It was mostly worth it in the end.

There were some other tourists there and a few people coming in to give prayers. You have to take off your shoes before entering the main room of the temple, something which I think is common in all of the religious houses there, no matter which religion it is. People were lighting sticks of incense and putting them in a holder outside before going in to pray in front of one of three deities. The main room itself was pretty small in comparision to the size of the whole building. After seeing the main part of the temple, I followed a sign to a tortoise pond, which was pretty much as described, a pond full of tortoises. As I stood there taking some photos and awing at the number of tortoises there were, a guy pulled up on a moped next to the fence bordering the pond. He stopped just long enough to plonk down on the pond side of the fence a poor tortoise with its legs and head pulled in. I guess it had gotten free and the guy was returning it to its home. After the moped zoomed off, the tortoise cautiously poked out its legs and head, then ran around rather aimlessly, probably still feeling freaked out, before running into the water and seeming a bit more calm. At least the guy saved it from being run over. I left the temple and went back to the city and I didn't really do much else that day except wait until it was time to go to the airport.

I will now write about the food I had in Kuala Lumpur, so if food doesn't interest you, you can skip the next few paragraphs... =) First off, the breakfast buffet at the hotel was amazing. There were just so many different types of food, it was quite impressive. I thought the buffet I had in Jamaica was incredible, but this one catered for even more cultures. There was the Western American/British food, like cereal and yogurt and eggs and sausage and pastries, but then also Asian foods such as curries and rice and fried noodles and sushi, which for them is normal breakfast food. I was well taken care of every morning with all the choices available.

For lunch and dinner though at first I only ate at safe places in the mall. On my first day I went to a cafe and had what is pretty much the national dish of Malaysia, nasi lemak. It's rice cooked in coconut milk and usually served with some sort of meat curry (in the one I had there was chicken in a slightly spicy curry), and then condiments like cucumber, roasted peanuts, little fried anchovies, a dab of sambal (spicy chili paste), and hard-boiled egg. Very yummy.

On my second day, I was more adventurous and finally ate at cheaper places around Chinatown. For lunch I ate at an Indian restaurant. A guy helped me order, basically he threw out suggestions and I would be like "that, yeah, I'll have that," heh. So I ordered vegetarian naan with tandoori chicken. I sat down and waited for the food to come. They aren't the most atmospheric places, it's like a kebab place or something with cafeteria tables and fluorescent lighting, but the people working there were all really nice and I never felt really guilty for being a stupid English-speaking tourist. I hadn't ordered a drink, mostly because I didn't know what to ask for, so one server after another kept coming over to ask me what I wanted to drink. I finally ordered something, especially since I was rather hot and thirsty. I saw a woman get something that looked like iced tea, so, though I don't normally like iced tea, I asked for one. What I got didn't look like what the woman had, it was milkier, but it tasted wonderful, it was sweet and and kind of like an iced chai. Then my food came, first the chicken, a few small pieces, along with mint chutney and a small bowl of dal. And then the naan bread, which was round and cut into pieces like a pizza. It had garlic and maybe coriander and some red bits I never identified on it, along with a few raisins. It was all so delicious and it looked so good. I wanted to take a photo but would have felt too silly. The total price of my lunch was 11 ringgit, or just a bit more than 2 euros.

My dinner was even cheaper and just as satisfying. I went to a street vendor near the market in Chinatown that was selling bowls of beef noodle soup and again managed to communicate what I wanted and then waited for them to bring it over. It was simple, just beef ramen essentially, but so filling and good. I asked for iced tea again and this time it was more like I expected, tea, no milk, with ice in it. All of that cost 5.50 ringgit, or just over 1 euro.

During the day I would sometimes stop and buy a drink from vendors on the street selling various iced beverages (for only 1 ringgit), some of which looked a bit scary. One looked black, I was never sure what it was made of and I was afraid to give it a try. The first time I stopped, I asked the guy what a yellow coloured one was. He answered back "cone" and I was like "what?" and he kept saying it and I eventually said "sorry, I'm not sure what you mean..." and just asked for the one that I could tell was orange flavoured. A woman came up in the meantime also to order something and the guy I guess said to her something like "What is [yellow-coloured flavour] in English?" and she said to me "cone" and I just looked back confused and said "sorry, I still don't understand..." But then it finally clicked: corn! And then were like "yes, corn! That's what we said!" Doh. So they have corn drink... I also once tried one that was a sweet milky drink with strips of green tea jelly in it. At least that's what I think it was, I only know that (and dared to try it) because I read about it somewhere. Pretty much anything cold was good though.