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Published: January 22nd 2009
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Wet and full of hopes for sunshine, we set off to Kuala Lumpur to dry out a little and make up our mind as to where we will be headed.
The trip into KL didn't turn out quite so straightforward either, mainly due to the fact that all buses were quite full as people were still on holiday. We had to break up our trip in a place called Kluang - somewhere you'd simply never go and if you did, you'd never take a picture of. There wasn't anything wrong with it, just nothing a tourist would be excited about - that's all.
We got to KL late at night and as we started to look for a taxi, we began to realise it was not going to be so simple. The bottom line is, no taxi driver in KL wants to use a meter. They see a foreign face and go 20 RM (instead of 5 RM). It's one thing if you are well rested and have all the time in the world, another if you're carrying 15-20 kg backpacks on your back. So, we had to give in to simply haggling the price here but that was
one and only time we agreed not to use the meter. And how did we do that? Well, if you ask around 20 cabs, there's bound to be one decent driver who'll say OK. He's obviously getting a tip :o)
As one can imagine, KL is quite a hectic place, very similar to Bangkok that way, but we managed to stay in a nice area (Bukit Bintang) where all hip bars and restaurants are. Some of the hostels there are almost like boutique hotels! So, we quite liked it :o) We also found a fish spa nearby.
Now, the idea of little fish nibbling at my skin does not necessarily sound relaxing, so we skipped the fishes and just got your normal oil full body massage. I have to say, that masseur could knead steel if you placed it underneath his hands. I think I came out of there with a few bruises on my legs but I must admit, the massage was bloody good and I felt like newborn when I woke up the next morning!
OK, so what else do you do in smoggy KL? Well, we ventured to the bird park, which actually was
a lot of fun as there were some species there that I've never seen in my life! Ma favourites (flamingos) were there too. Only thing, they were not very pink. Someone's thin on the shrimp side, me thinks…
Another thing to do is obviously going up to the Petronas sky bridge, 170m above the ground. The good news is, there is a number of tickets given away each day for free. The bad news is, you have to rock up there for 8am (it opens at 8.30am) and queue up. The tickets are going like water and so the time slots (there is only a limited number of viewers allowed at one particular time on the bridge - let's hope it's got nothing to do with its stability, hehe). We got there for 9am and got a time slot for 1pm. We had time to kill… That ended up in a shopping mall - something that KL is literally made of.
20 cushion covers later (Kasia's purchase of the day), we went back to the towers to be brought up to the 40 odd floor and I have to make a confession here - I wasn't impressed. I
mean, big views are always cool but that one was just OK. I guess the one landmark that would look pretty good, well, we standing on it. And the rest of the KL buildings didn't really make a huge impression. Oh well, it's definitely a good activity to do - just don't expect anything breathtaking.
Apart from being a tourist attraction, The sky bridge also acts as a safety route - in the event of a fire or other emergency in one tower, people can evacuate by crossing the sky bridge to the other tower. However, it's not very useful when two towers need to be evacuated at the same time… It was actually tested in 2001 - one day after 9/11 there was a bomb hoax in the towers and people had to use lifts to get out of the building… Let's hope they don't have to do it often. Also, the fire alarm drills must be a real pain when you are working on the 88th floor!
Petronas Towers themselves are pretty cool. They are still supposedly the highest twin office buildings in the world. They have 88 office floors! Slightly fewer than the NYC Twin
Towers had (110) but still pretty impressive. Each tower was actually built by a different company (so you know who to blame in case something went wrong ;o) The area that it was built on used to be KL's race track. Because of the type of ground there, they required 120m of foundation and since the whole building is made of high-strength concrete (steel was too expensive) the whole design is pretty sophisticated so it's able to support that giant. Well, at least you know they did what they could, really.
Who's in here then? Tower One seems to be occupied by the Petronas Company themselves - it's their headquarters. Tower Two is inhabited by Accenture, McKinsey & Co, Al Jazeera English, Bloomberg, Boeing, IBM, Microsoft or Reuters amongst many others. The towers are even home to the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra and some gallery of modern art that we spotted there. Quite a diverse place if you ask me.
After all that modern huh-hah, we thought it'd be best to see the other side of KL. It so happened that my work colleague who's originally from Malaysia was there too. And so we arranged to meet up. Yen
took us to the Central Market, which is a lovely place full of lots of beautiful hand made souvenirs. It's all very folky and just the opposite of shopping malls. After a walk around there, we headed towards Chinatown, which was an experience in itself.
Chinatown is lined with stalls mainly selling Gucci and Louis Vuitton fakes. I mean, if you were a LV fan, you could come out of there dressed in it from top to bottom: female and male! It's crazy no other brands attract the fake makers like Gucci or LV.
Anyway, shopping there is more of a cultural experience than just shopping - the haggling levels go up a few pegs and it's a great way to test your skill. We managed to get things down from 250-300 RM to 40-50 RM, which I guess is alright. The items themselves supposedly cost the sellers around 10 RM, so 30 RM profit should be just fine. I wonder whether people actually pay anywhere close to 200 RM? Hmmm.
One thing we were introduced to at the market by Yen were banana pancakes. I'm convinced they were actually coconut and the seller must have confused
the English words. Nonetheless, the pancakes were so nice, we actually went back to the market before leaving KL to have them again.
All in all, KL was good fun although definitely not a place to hang around too long at. It's a great hub for cheap flights with Air Asia and that's exactly what we did - we grabbed a flight to Bali in the search for some swimming and golden brown tans. More about Bali next time!
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