Thursday, January 3, 2008

Days 48 – 49: Kuala Lumpur

Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2051068&l=a4ba0&id=1101094

I arrived in Kuala Lumpur and went straight to Lee Mun’s Guest House to meet Kendyl. I dropped my pack and we went and ate Chinese food and drank Tiger Beer. It was good to finally spend some time with a native English speaker.

That night we walked around Kuala Lumpur, which has a surprising amount of park space in the center city. We walked through a deer park and down to a lake, and on the way back we passed Mesjid Negara (National Mosque), a spacious white building that was bathed in blue light by night. The mosque was far more modern looking than those I had seen in the Middle East.

We spent the next day seeing the sights of KL, starting with the famous Petronas Towers, which were the tallest buildings in the world until 2004. We were happy to find that entrance to the towers was free (all you had to do was watch a short film filled with Petronas propaganda), but unhappy to find that we could only go as high as the Skybridge, on the 41st floor of the towers. In any case, the smog was so bad that views were limited.

We ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant and attempted to determine the language of the KL residents we came into contact with; people here speak Malay, multiple dialects of Chinese, Tamil, and even English, so it’s often difficult to figure out which language to learn.

Late that afternoon we visited Menara Kuala Lumpur (Kuala Lumpur Tower), which is the fourth-highest TV tower in the world. Views were better than from the Petronas Towers, but in the end KL’s skyline is mediocre, at best.

That evening we attempted to watch Entrapment to catch a glimpse of the Petronas Towers we had just visited, but both Kendyl and I fell asleep less than halfway into the movie. It seems that Kendyl conks out just as quickly and easily as I do. Hopefully that won’t present a problem—I can just picture us falling asleep on a bus and getting our packs stolen from under our noses.

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