goodbye to cheap days

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Well our flight was on time and here we are in KL. Quite nice to be in a city with excellent transport, immaculate streets and lots of choice but no more cheap beer and food (still cheaper than Dublin of course and good preperation for Singapore/Oz/NZ). The pubs stay open quite late here so we are optomistic about seeing the match tonight - there's yet another Finnegans here and a Reggae bar opposite our hostel which shows sports - we would of course rather meet a few other Irish to roar with but getting to see the match will be good enough.

Our first night here we headed to the Reggae bar and met a Canadian guy and his Austrian girlfriend - he told us a hilarious story and I would now formally, in true Have I Got News For You style, smack a big fat ALLEGEDLY in front of the following:

So the Canadian guy was in Dublin last year and met up with his friend who was studying at the Royal College of Surgeons. Through contacts of hers they ended up out with the Irish rugby team. Dr O'Driscoll , the team doctor, was chatting to him and they were discussing University/College and O'D told him that Ronan O'Gara had just completed his M.A. Ronan came up then and Canadian guy said to him 'So what were you doing in college?' Ronan says 'Why do you want to know?' Canadian guy says 'Oh I just heard you finished your M.A so I was wondering what you studied' Ronan then went into a rant that went something like this 'Who do you think you are, Just because I'm a rugby player you think I'm too stupid to go to college, how dare you? You're just some kid and you think I'm too stupid to study blah blah blah...people had to step in and remove ROG from the situation.
What a goon. Allegedly.

Anyway - yesterday we went to the Menara KL tower which is a big complex that looks like the Seattle Space Needle. We went up and saw the whole city from there - great views. There are an amazing amount of skyscrapers here. Apparantley this tower has better views than the Petronas towers but we did manage to get some good pics of them all lit up at night too. At the same place we did a Zip Line which was great fun - I think Paul may be putting up pics of us in our harnesses and helmets now. Prepare to be dazzled. Right beside there is a city forest - we wandered about for a while in the hope of seeing monkeys and just as we'd given up and were on our way back out we saw 3 monkeys sitting on a fence a few yards from us! They were so cute, grooming each other and just chillaxing on the fence. Despite our incredibly sweaty heads we stood and watched them for a good while!
We then did what every self respecting tourist would do and went to the cinema! It was a real treat . Went to see the Dark Knight - the new Batman one - pretty good.

So far our impression of Kuala Lumpur is a good one. Very multicultural with Malays, Indian, Chinese, Western all living in what looks like relative harmony. Every street seems fairly mixed so we get the impression that there isn't the type of ghettoisation (is that a word?) that you get in other cities. Every type of food you can imagine is available including all the American fast food chains and every Asian cuisine. Happy days. Transport is easy with a Monorail (I hear those things are awfully loud...
It glides as softly as a cloud. Monorail! Monorail! Monorail! Mono - D'oh), light rail system and buses. No tuk tuks though much to our disappointment. I'm going on a crusade to get Tuk Tuks in Dublin.

Right so - heading to Melaka tomorrow hopefully. Will be in touch.
Oh and congratulations to Donal and Liz on their impending Parenthood and the now official Dr Donncha Sean Lucey on his graduation. (aren't we all still 18???)

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Photos

petronas towers
as seen in some god-awful james bond film