At home in KL

  Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Saturday, December 2, 2006

Time to give you a quick look at the expat way of living in Malaysia. It ain't too bad and we're certainly not complaining.

Bidara flat

For the first three months Marta's company put us up in a small apartment in the centre of KL, in an area called Bukit Bintang or 'star hill', just a few minutes walk from her office. The Bukit Bintang district is quite lively - it's nothing historical (that's a 10 minute walk down the hill near the river) but it's the heart of the so-called Golden Triangle area, which has a concentration of malls, 5-star hotels, bars, and restaurants. Quite nice to have everything at walking distance.

Bidara balcony

The first apartment, called the Bidara, was smaller than our Prague pad, but it had 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and a balcony, plus a small pool downstairs. The two large cockroaches that had Marta clinging to the ceiling in the first week were effectively exterminated with these little black poison units, but unfortunately for her the rubbish that people chuck out on the surrounding streets feeds a healthy population of large rats that scurry along the streets at dusk. No good for the nerves of ratophobes. 

Bidara view

My main problem with the place was the nearby Istana Cruz disco, that would belt out thumping music every day from 22:00 to about 03:00 and all day on Sunday (when all the Philipino maids in town have their day off and party hard) with little regard for residents. We slept in the guestroom to avoid much of the noise but to hear it daily was annoying as hell.

In December we moved into our new place, just a five minute walk away. It took us a week to find - we walked around all the apartments in the area, spoke to the doormen, had a vew agents give us tours and finally settled on the Angsara Impian 2 complex.

Angsara Impian 13

It's great. Large, airy, clean, and has a great pool, tennis and squash courts and a gym downstairs. The landlord is a nice Chinese Malaysian man with a travel agency and 5 apartments across town. I hear that 80% of the people living here are foreigners, though we actually don't see so many people at all - never more than a few people sitting round the pool anyway. The complex has two towers with 28 floors and 5 apartments on each floor. There's security at both entrances to check everyone coming in, . We're in one of the smaller units (about 120 square metres) on the 3rd floor, with 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a study, kitchen with washing room. That's the smallest they had! We're paying about the same here as for our 100sq.m. flat in Prague - and that was without a lift and all these facilities... the park view in Prague was better though.

Angsara Impian 11

We're on the 3rd floor but actually we're high in the sky - perhaps 30 metres above ground level. That's because nearly all highrises in KL are built on top of car parks. So there are 3 levels of parking before they have the 'ground' level with the reception and pool. That's very unusual in Europe and an architect I spoke to said it had to do with restrictions on building height (which don't exist here) and the fact that it's much cheaper to build up than dig down. Unfortunately, that means that walking on street level you see many car parks - unlike in European cities where they are buried beneath these kind of buildings. Malaysians hate walking and worship cars so they don't care.

Angsara Impian 12

We're still just a few minutes walk from Marta's office (she comes home for lunch as often as possible). Also in the direct area is a small row of so-called shophouses - traders houses that have been converted into restaurants and guesthouses, with Indian, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Thai and Nonya (Malay-Chinese) restaurants. A little further is Jalan Alor (Alor street) which is one of the larger open-air hawker streets - it's lined with dozens of cheap restaurants (mostly Chinese, many serving seafood) and stalls with all kinds of food.

Angsara Impian 3

Just beyond is the commercial centre of Bukit Bintang, with the monorail station and a handful of large malls. There's Lot 10 which houses the excellent Japanese Isetan department store with a supermarket and bakery in the basement - these guys have great fresh sushi to take away for a fraction of the price in Europe. Across the street is the massive BB Plaza and Sungai Wang shopping complex. I was there today and got lost again - it's huge with many small shops and badly indicated exits. There are two department stores in there, plus the post office and shops selling pirated DVDs. Behind it the 5-floor Low yat Plaza, which is the nerd's mall, as it only has electronics. Some of the cheapest laptops, mobiles, PCs etc etc in the world plus an incredible amount of pirated software sold in the open.

Angsara Impian 10

Ten minutes in the other direction and we arrive at Bukit Nanas hill, which is partly covered in rainforest with trains to walk along - quite nice if you come prepared for the mosquitos. On top of the hill stands the 5th highest communications tower in the world, the Menara KL (= KL Tower). Great views from up there. They make a big deal of the fact that when it was built, they moved the building site 50m to save a rare tree - buit ignore to mention that they had to bulldoze a large part of the protected rainforest park anyway to make place for the tower foundations. Oh well.

Anyway, that's an idea of the place we live. Click above to see more photos and explanations of what you're looking at.