Goodbye Sydney, Hello KL
Trip Start
Apr 22, 2008
1
2
26
Trip End
Sep 01, 2008
Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia
Thursday, April 24, 2008
transfers between lines) was only 120 RY or about 35 US cents. This combined with the fact that you a zipping above traffic in Walt Disney's idealized version of transportation makes it all that much better. I'm not sure which is a better tag-line for a monorail:
-The monorail: the only "ride" your kids can go on with Grandma because she threw out her hip
Street food in KL
. -The monorail: helping Floridians stay fat since 1976
The city is a fun mix of ultra modern and old school Asia. It makes for some great views. You can be eating street food at a plastic picnic table on the sidewalk where they pull your fish from a tank and kill it to order and then look up to see the Petronas towers: their mass of glass and steel towering over the roofs of some dilapidated huts. That contrast in concert with the huge influence green space development makes a great mix of contrasts as you walk (or monorail) through the city.
KL was a first for me in many ways:
-The first destination on my trip!
-The first city in Asia (or for that matter the world) that I visited that is predominately Islamic. Having done a fair share of traveling in living in some big cities (Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Sydney) I have had lots of exposure to conservative Muslim dress. Never have I been in a city were approximately 50 percent of the women had their heads covered and more than a handful were in the more conservative burqas. It was a cool experience to get a greater exposure to Muslim practice in an Islamic country
Petronas Towers at Night
. Even driving by theNational Mosque (which is HUGE) was a welcome reminder that I was seeing a different part of the world.
-The first Asian city that had cosmopolitan diversity. What the hell do I mean by that? A lot of cities will have a China town or little India but those areas tend to be ghetto-ized (for lack of a better word). KL seemed to be booming with all sorts of immigrants (or tourists) and they all seemed to be everywhere. Yes, there were higher
concentrations of Chinese in Chinatown and Indians in Little India, but large numbers of Thai, Chinese, Indians, Western Europeans, Africans and Americans and even South Americans (let's be real, you hardly ever
see South Americans when traveling this part of the world) were walking the streets. Malay and English are both widely used, but I was blown away to hear such a large number of other languages as I walked around. Maybe I've just been in Australia too long and forgot what that type of diversity feels like...or more appropriately sounds like. Then again, I was in the tourist areas of KL. The same view may be true of Sydney as well, I just didn't see it since frequenting Circular Quay is not how I spent the last two years.
Good food, great views and an overall terrific start to the trip. One negative: rain. A month of non-stop rain and the "dry" season in Malaysia is characterized by thunder and lightening. Fingers crossed the Harris curse that broke the drought in Oz will not leave me soaking wet this holiday.
Comments
Good luck!
Sounds like a helluva trip, mate. Keep posting pictures. Give it some time and 5 hour trips will soon enough begin to seem long again. But not unpalatable.
I think I am going to have to call you Matt 'diversity is cool!' Harris until yu see a few more less than homogeneous places... that's funny. BTW: be glad: I'd take the Harris Curse over Brown Class any day. (Yes, it is still in effect. Good thing you are half way around the world!)
Be safe, and be careful with those massage parlors (even those ever-present foot massage places along every street in KL).
BK