Our personal city tour

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This morning we took the bus and arrived at the Petronas towers at 9:45 to find a huge line and to be told that package 2 tickets had just been sold out. Tomorrow we plan to drag ourselves out of bed around 7 or 7 30 like the woman told us to do yesterday (we didn't listen) and head over there to get a spot in line.

Thwarted, yet again, we left to go to the National Art Gallery. It's so far north it's almost not on our map, but we decided to go against the advice from the tourism brochure to take a taxi and instead walked. It took about 15 - 20 minutes and was an easy walk beside the roads without too many surprises. There's also a bus you can take from the towers (1113 maybe?) but we didn't know the number and it didn't seem to be too hard to get there by foot.

The museum itself is quite an ugly building from the exterior and I was pretty surprised. When you go up the escalator and into the foyer there is a change, however, and you are greeted with a clean, spacious room and friendly workers. It has three floors with two galleries on each and it's not the best museum I've ever been to. They don't seem to foster artistic creativity much here.

Our next stop was to the National Palace so we asked the man at the front desk how we could get to KL Sentral, the main train terminal. He told us we'd have to take a bus to the Petronas towers and then from there switch to another bus that would take us to the station. After we told him we didn't mind walking and that we'd walked from the towers to there he said, "Oh, well in that case..." and proceeded to tell us how to get to the nearest monorail station. We decided to do this just for the experience, so we headed out

It was a 20 minute walk with our 5-minute "where the heck are we supposed to go" detour, but when we arrived around noon at the Titiwangsa station we paid for a single journey ticket (2.50 each to get to KL Sentral) and the small, two-car, air-conditioned train came a few seconds later and it only took about 20 minutes to ride the whole line. What I did think was strange, however, was that there were no maps of the metro system! On the train there was the line near the ceiling marking each station on that line, but the map outlining all of the lines was nowhere to be found -- not even on the platforms! So strange!

When we got off we asked about the palace but no one had heard of it so we decided to skip it and head to the National Museum. Along the way we stopped by information to ask about how to get to Melaka and to pick up a sandwich before crossing, probably illegally, the Hilton Hotel's property to get to the other side and closer to the museum.

When we (again, illegally) crossed several lanes of highway and made our way to the museum (around 13:30), we paid and walked in to find a huge exhibit in the main foyer highlighting the recent victory of the Malaysian soccer team in the AFF Suzuki Cup 2010. It was pretty funny because people were taking pictures of themselves with the blown-up photos of the champs. The museum was not my favorite, but I'm not that fascinated by history, so if you're a history buff, you'll probably like it. It had a lot of things on display and offered a lot (maybe too much) information about Malaysia's long and difficult history.

We walked to the National Mosque after this but it was closed until 15:00 to non-Muslims so we waited for about 20 minutes and walked around to explore other areas nearby. When we were allowed to enter we put on the purple robes and walked up the stairs but only stayed for about 5 minutes -- the area tourists are allowed in is not very big.

We skipped the Muslim Art Museum (too hot and tired!) and while we were walking back ran into a road block and walked through to find that a marching competition for kids (the girls were on one side with headscarves, boys on the other) was about to start. We waited for about 10 minutes but they were all still lining up so we left, bought snacks and water, and went to do some research on flights to Bali and the Philippines.

We have decided to throw Bali out of the mix because it's just too expensive. The flights have literally doubled since the last time we checked, so our plan is to go to Melaka tomorrow for two days and then on to Singapore. Hopefully in Singapore we'll be able to CouchSurf, but we'll have to just wait and see!

For our last night we walked along Chinatown for a bit (Ronald bought some shoes), got some beer, and hung out on the roof with other people at the hostel.

7 am for the Petronas Towers!

Technical Details
-Admission to the art museum is free
-most public buldings have a "surau" -- prayer room
-"tandas" = restroom, "langkawi" = men
-admission to the National Museum: Foreigner (Adult): RM 5; Malaysian (Adult): RM 2
-photography is allowed, but without flash
-a free tour is offered (on varying days depending on the language) in French, English, Malay, Mandarin, or Japanese at 10 am

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