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While staying in Singapore we decide to do a short trip to Kuala Lumpar. The bus seems to be the best way to get there and there are loads of buses each day ranging in quality and price. Even the cheapest bus is far better than any of the buses we have taken so far in Asia, and I doubt we will be having the same experience we had on the way to Vientiane. We leave early on Saturday morning and the trip only takes about 5 hours so we are in KL city by early afternoon.
We have booked a hotel on line and it turns out to be very nice with great rooms, we have a room on the 20th floor so we get a good view of the city which is full of skyscrapers and more than anything shopping malls. Just around our hotel in very close walking distance there must be 10 shopping malls. It is a very strange place as the malls all have the designer shops inside while on stalls within the same malls and on the street markets, vendors sell the exact same goods as copies! It seems that KL is the fake
capital of the world and copyright/trademark laws means, 'How much ??? no way I'll give you 6 dollars for that beautifully coppied solid silver Tiffany's necklace.'
We expolre the city using the very efficeint and cheap light mono rail service. A single trip costs about 30pence. Some of the trains are very crowded and Shenton tries to push me onto one while the doors are closing but I manage to get off before the train leaves with me on it and Shenton on the platform holding both of our tickets....
The first place we visit is Chinatown, this has some lovely temples which are very ornate, we enter the night market which is another scooby do buffet experience of fake bags, fake watches, silk scarfs and sport wear in a continuing loop. It seems odd that none of the stalls are selling anything that seems to be unique to Malaysia (apart from a couple of stalls selling models of the twin towers). We walk from Chinatown over to Little India where we hope to eat some nice food. As we arrive we are again in a big market but this time it is full of materials and head
scalfs, as well as the usual fake bags and watches.
We walk down a street that is full of silk shops but we cant seem to find a restauarnt that sells Indian food! I think we must have missed the road somehow because surely in little India you should be able to buy a decent curry! Malysian food seems to be a fusion of Indian and Chinese food but we really fancy a curry so we head back towards the hotel on the mono rail and just round the corner from our hotel we manage to find a lovely Indian Restauarnt where we enjoy the buffet food ( every kind of curry you can imagine). We eat until we are stuffed and it only costs about £3 each, just what we were looking for, yummy.
On our second day we start off with a huge breakfast at the hotel and book our ticket back on the bus for tomorrow at time square, which is nothing like time square in NY but you guessed it another shopping mall. The tickets are even cheaper here to go back to Singapore. We spend a few hours relaxing by the pool and
Shenton has a work out in the gym. It is pretty hot out so we wait until a little later in the afternoon before we head out again. First stop is the twin towers, tall and imposing with a shopping mall underneath.The shopping mall is designer heaven, (the real stuff) we have a look around and we go into all the designer shops to compare what we have seen on the market stalls. We have been talking about how I like to go into the perfume shops to have a spray of the new perfumes so as we have a look in the Hermes shop Shenton makes a beeline for the perfume stand. He starts to smell them and as I approach I see him spraying one in his hand and rubbing it on his neck. I then tell him I think he is at the women's perfume section and the men's is across the shop, the shop assitant is laughing and agrees, we both leave the shop laughing! He does smell lovelly and fruity!!
Our trip to KL is short but sweet, The city is a place of contrasts, on the one hand it is young, vibrant and
seems open to expression, but then there are the religious police (muslim) who are quietly watching in the background. After another lovely breakfast we take the bus back again to get ready for our flight to Japan, our last stop - it really doesn't seem possible that this is true. Time flys..
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