Friday, July 29, 2011

Kuala Lumpur

So we are onto our second day in KL, yesterday was really just the whole process of getting here and arriving, we didn't do too much more after that. We did see a lot of people with the yellow shirt of the national soccer team, I read in a paper this morning that they had a draw with Singapore, 1-1, meaning they lost on aggregate and are already out of calculations for the World Cup, which is on in a few years...

We are staying in a place called the Step Inn Guest house. We have our own room, a twin. It's ok, pretty basic, although we do have free wi fi. An interesting section is the bathroom (all shared), and you can find that the toilet and the shower are within the same cubicle....there is also the option to use another shower, which has one option, of cold. It's about 30 degrees most days, so that was the option for me.

Today we started reasonably early, with a plan of walking around. The man behind reception had given us a very detailed map and some good advice on where to go. Conveniently, we left that behind at dinner last night.

I have been to KL a couple of times now. Last year was my first visit, I had a couple of days on the way to London. Then as a matter of fact, only a few weeks ago I was here for the first ever Malaysian Footbag Championships. The links will take you to what I wrote about the previous visits. The first one on this here blog, and the second on the Shred Global footbag website.

Last night was pretty low key, by the time we arrived we were pretty exhausted, we just got some dinner not too far away then were in bed not too long after that. This morning we were up pretty early and made our way to the KL Tower. Once they let us know of the 45 RM fee, we were heading back down. The worst thing is the fact that you can't just buy the ticket for the viewing deck. I had been there before, so I could probably just bring out a picture from my previous visit....maybe I can do that later.


Here's the tower in question. It was pretty wet this morning, but of course it would be warm compared to the -8 we would have been suffering in back in Canberra. We wandered back down from the tower and given the fact you could eat about 10 dinners for the price of entrance for two, that was a good move at the beginning of the day.

We had a bit of a wander along and soon enough we were below the Petronas Towers. Francisca, an architect by trade in the past didn't like them at all, she said they were "too 90s". I was kicking around the footbag while waiting for something, and hit the tricky blurry whirl....this may become a feature of the trip....5 add tricks hit in front of famous locations??? However we're going around for a couple of months and it wouldn't be too long until I ran out of tricks at that level.

Anyway, from the Petronas we wandered in no particular direction, but it turned out the direction was heading off the edge of our map. It was only really a map of the central area of the city, but we stopped for a while at the National Art Gallery, had a look at some art, drank a freshly squeezed orange juice and then got back on the road again.

We also saw a cow....


Seeing cows in Canberra, that's not too surprising, and seeing the sacred cow in India won't be surprising at all, but in KL a pretty big city, I didn't really expect to see any cows....

After passing the edge of our map, we jumped onto the monorail, which was completely packed and headed to the other end of the line, KL Sentral. This was also the other end of the map, which we soon passed through into the Brickfields or Little India area. We ended up eating at a place called Gandhi's, a vegetarian buffet. The food was quite good and it was pretty cheap for a good sized serve.

We wandered in this area for a while, and seemed to just keep on going in circles. We were planning to walk back into the centre of town, but that was hard to do as we weren't really going anywhere. We got back onto the monorail to get us back into the thick of things, and now we are taking a rest back at the hostel, and will probably go down to the chinatown area once we are feeling rested.

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Daniel is now living in Santiago de Chile. You can find some more writing at I Love Chile

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