Thoughts on Kuala Lumpur

Well, once again, due to my illness (i'm fully better now though) we stayed somewhere a lot longer than what we should of. Kuala Lumpur turned into a week long stay. That's not a bad thing though. Kuala Lumpur is very similar to Singapore, except where Singapore had clinically spotless streets with chewing gum and offense, Kuala Lumpur is filthy with the smells of the sewer system mixing with the smells of the restaurants and food hawkers on the street. We even saw a few rats, Andrea clocked one that was dragging a plastic bag containing some food up the embankment. It was doing a better job of cleaning the streets than the local refuse service anyway.

I'm sure i'm painting a pretty awful picture of Kuala Lumpur, but it all adds to the charm of the place. The locals are very friendly, often calling Andrea a "beautiful lady" when i'm not around. The shopping is fantastic, easily as good as Singapore. You have different shopping centers for different stuff. If you like your Prada, Gucci and Tiffany's there's a shopping center rammed full of them. There's also one thats full of computing equipment, apple, sony, hp, toshiba all present. It kinda reminded me a bit of a giant 7 floor Bowlers on a Saturday. Phone shops are everywhere, so much so that you think that they would never sell anything 'cause there must me more phone dealers than there are people that want phones!

Chinatown was also an amusing place, the market in the evening was rammed full of people and traders with alleyways no wider than your shoulders. Occasionally there will be a mobile fruit vendor that's pushing a trolley up and down the alleyways 'cause chaos for shoppers. You can also tell when the customs people are around as the traders all of a sudden become quieter and rapidly hide their dodgey dvds and fake watches. They all have walky talkies to communicate with each other when danger lurks.

We also went up to do the skybridge walk between the two Petronas towers (pronounced a wierd way). The system is, is that they have a fixed number of free tickets available each day. It's a first come first served thing and you need to be there at 8:30 to grab your free tickets. Being the lazy arses that we are, we turned up at around midday in the hope of getting out tickets. Naturally, they were all gone for the day which was a disappointment, but then along came some german fella who offered to give sell us two tickets 'cause he couldn't make it. For 10 ringits (1.20 in real money), it was a bargain as i would of gladly went way above his asking price for it. The skybridge itself was good except that you have to sit though a naff 3D presentation on how great Petronas is as a company. It wasn't shrek 3D, and with the glasses on it made me feel quite sick more than anything...Andrea was wooed though. From the floor the towers don't seem to be as big as what you would think, i don't know why this is. Andrea says that the empire state building, whilst smaller, is much more impressive. Saying that though, at night the building looks amazing lit up as it is so bright that you can see a big column of light going into the sky.

The other thing we did apart from eat and shop was go to the top of the KL Tower which offered much better views than the Petronas towers could. With camera in hand we snapped away and even found our hotel in the city. Andrea, being the perve that she is, was using the free telescopes not to admire the view but to look into peoples hotel rooms. She worries me sometimes.

The trip to the airport was interesting too. There has been a lot of publicity here about the state of the coaches and the coach drivers after quite a few bad crashes. A lot of the drivers have actually been banned, but the system doesn't pick up on it. They also get paid for performance, so the quicker they get to their destination the more they get paid. This worried us enough to just get a taxi to the airport as it would be the safer option...or so we we thought. Once the taxi driver hit the motorway he just floored it, overtaking, undertaking, and going incredibly close to the car in front. Andrea told the taxi driver that he was dangerous and should be racing on Formula 1, he was more impressed than insulted. The taxi driver did tell me though that i looked a lot younger than what i was and that i had good eyes, that would of been good if it came from a lady, instead it just worried me slightly.

A bonus sight from the plane on leaving the airport was seeing the Malaysian Grand Prix circuit from above, it's very impressive.

So now we're here for a week on the beautiful islands of Langkawi. We're taking a bit of time out to sun ourselves and relax a little before we go to Vietnam on a whistle stop two week tour. Come to think of it, why am i writing this here when i should be in the sun!...i'm gonna go to the beach now and grab me a coctail or two. woo !