A short 2½ hour flight puts us into KLIA, Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Apparently no one ever says Kuala Lumpur. KL is the reference in all signage, speech and print. KK wanted to come here primarily because it is fun to say Kuala Lumpur. The airport is 78 kilometers south of KL itself and is connected to the city by an expressway and rail system.
It never ceases to amaze us when there are travelers that do not make the slightest effort to know even the most basic courtesies and customs of a country they are visiting. Can you always get it right? No. Will it often be obvious you are making the effort? Yes. The issue I am leading up to involves a late teens/Early twenties Bottle blonde harlot-in-training on our Malaysia Air flight. This young lady was dressed in an outfit that would make Madonna blush (for those who are too young for the Madonna reference substitute Shakira or Carmen Electra) Short shorts that demonstrated her depilatory skills, F-me pumps, and a sleeveless button down top that demanded “Stare at ME!” (or “US” depending on your point of view…) Now please do not mistake me for a prude, by any stretch. I fully support the “if you got, flaunt it” as well as the “No need for you to imagine, I’m happy to just show you” western approach to casual dress. But when flying from a devout Muslim country into an even more devout Muslim country, on the more devout one’s flagship airline, a certain level of fashion restraint is in order. The discomfort of the crew and a few of the passengers was noticeable.
All of this can be, and usually is, written off as barbarian infidels having no concept of respect. This was when the young lady decided she needed to use the loo during the final approach for landing. The cabin crew was beating on the toilette door demanding she take her seat. She was actually arguing she wasn’t finished; she’ll come out when she was done… Literal seconds before touchdown she exited the head. A crewmember actually threw her onto one of the crew jumpseats and buckled her in as the wheels touched tarmac. He was PISSED, and not in the just had a few cold ones way. As we were deplaning he had her boarding pass and passport and was writing on a very official looking form. She was ineffectively pouting. I suspect she was completely unaware that this country has a more direct and physical approach for handling even minor legal offenses. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the strict laws in Singapore concerning public cleanliness and order (getting caned for spitting on the sidewalk, littering, chewing gum in public, etc). KL is not too different in that respect.
The History: Malaysia’s current political entity has been in power since 1957. Historically it is the realm of pirates. Traditional piracy is still a primary form of commerce in the Straight of Malacca. Throw a few well-armed thugs into a Boston Whaler and have them “capture” a 200,000 ton ship. Commercial vessels are the usual targets. Believe it or not, the most effective deterrent is a fire hose… Apparently pirates are like cats- they hate to get wet.
Modern techno piracy has also evolved: DVD, software, electronics, knock-offs, etc. A study was done in SE Asia with a sadly entertaining discovery: A software company priced its latest release US$1 less than the pirate version. People still bought the pirated copies. Why? The most common answer was better package art on the copies… In many cases it never even occurred to the consumer to check the price on the licensed product. Even if a software company tries to give its product for free, to students, teachers and schools for example, people (and institutions) will still pay for a pirated copy. This is not to imply rampant crime and debauchery in KL, it seems to be the opposite in fact. People are straightforward, polite and we found a bare minimum of sleaze.
Kuala Lumpur: Traffic, while dense, is orderly and correct. People are polite, well, maybe not so much polite as not pushy and demanding. The streets are clean. Almost as clean as
Seattle/Portland after a good rain. Our mid-range hotel, The Ancasa, is actually pretty ritzy. It is located at the “entrance” of Chinatown, and a reasonable walk from the Petronas towers, the KL tower (space phallus) and primary shopping districts.KL is an energetic, vibrant and dynamic city. There is new construction, remodeling and infrastructure expansion occuring all over. After our time in Indonesia it is refreshing to be in an optimistic city. KL is also more than 90% Muslim, with many women wearing full shawls. There is also a noticeable full burka population (The burka is the traditional orthodox Muslim dress for women, A black solid head to toe fabric with just a slit for the eyes.)
Commerce is the lifeblood of this city. Huge multi-block plazas and malls connected by sky bridges, street stalls, and markets abound. The country is celebrating 50 years of continuous rule
and is also having a major tourist promotion to let people now it is safe to visit Malaysia. In many stores you get a 5% discount if you can prove you are a foreigner (passport or drivers license).The main Chinatown Night Market at Jelan Petaling is just a block from the hotel. This is an insane press of stalls and bodies that stretches along for 400 meters north to south and another 200
meters east/west on a cross street. It is a mixed blessing being the giant westerners We can see where we want to go, but we are too big to glide between the bodies to get there. Vendors have tables set back to back in the middle of the street, Stalls line both sides, and there is a sidewalk that still manages to stay clear in front of the brick & mortar storefronts. If you get stuck in the inner lane, you can walk a long way before there is an opening to jump to the sidewalk. It is quite the press of sounds and smells, not all of them Organic…Visionary small restaurants set up dozens of tables, sometimes in front of other eating establishments. We sat at a table thinking we were ordering from the place behind us. Turns out it was across and down the street! (It was still excellent- best street food we have had since Thailand) Beer girls sell specific beers: Carlsberg, Bintang, etc. Street musicians will serenade a block of tables and then pass the hat. DVD touts will come along with a sheaf of covers. He takes your “order” and runs back to his stand/stall to check inventory and delivers what he can. KL was founded by pirates. It is part of the cultural psyche. (Flashback: JD took an intro psyche class in undergrad. The professor was livid that the word “psyche” was ever used. It technically didn’t exist, and had no place in educated discussion. It is still a fun word to use… and for a non-existent word, most people still seem to know what it doesn’t mean.)
While our hotel had in-house wireless for a fee, the Starbucks down the street had free WiFi and a signal that made it all the way to our room (most of the time). It was refreshing to have an actual broadband connection, and choices of provider to boot! Checking email in seconds and uploading photos in minutes rather than hours was joyous.
Our hotel was also hosting an international darts tourney. Teams from Britain, Germany, India and assorted other places competing for a number of cash prizes. Speaking of cash, it was a large shift in our currency conversion gears: US$1=3.5 Malay Ringit (MR). Our first nights feast ran about 30 MR, including the beer. Living large, that’s our style!
We have a good feeling about this city and figure the enjoyment potential to be high.Starbucks may have been driven out of Beijing, but it is solidly entrenched in KL. Certainly not in the same densities as Seattle, but you don’t have to travel too far between mocha’s either. Maneuvering across a complicated traffic circle/rerouting hub brings us to the MayBank KL headquarters. It is our custom to try and find the biggest commercial bank in any given country and use it’s ATMs. Here that is MayBank. After climbing/riding an escalator through wonderfully landscaped grounds we are greeted by two solid walls of ATMs outside the main bank branch. Smack in the middle of this scenic outdoor foyer is another Starbucks… (Neither of us particularly likes Starbucks coffee as a drink, however it is always a little snippet of home to see the white block letters, green background, and titillatingly risqué mermaid logo. Especially in places like bank lobbies.) ATMs don’t always give an English option, however the procedures never seem to vary. When in doubt- hit cancel.
With a fistful of Ringit we saunter off to a mall a few kilometers away. It is supposed to have a Borders Bookstore. It is time to get a few newer books, and KK has a shopping Jones that needs fixed badly. JD figures he’ll hang in the Borders café and surf while KK devastates the mall. Just to reiterate: it is heartening to see boom cranes, construction fence, supply trucks and such. In our visual field alone there are at least a half-dozen working boom cranes on different projects. Some might think visually unappealing and dirty. I think jobs, growth and healthy economy. Especially after Indonesia.
The Borders is located in a HUGE mall just off the monorail line. This is one of about a dozen HUGE malls in a 6 to 8 square block area. Just a half klick in any direction will bring to even more HUGE malls. This is not addressing the little malls and centers that fill the spaces, such as they are, between the HUGE malls. (When I say HUGE, that means 4+ floors and 300+ stores, theaters and food options). KL is a shopper’s fantasyland. Real labels, fake labels, artisans, kitsch, anything and anything else tangible can be found.
During most of the first and second millennia Gregorian (0 AD to the early 1900’s) the Chinese were THE merchants in most SE Asian lands. Considering any lands or people outside the Middle Kingdom were supposedly ghosts and figments of the imagination, a large amount of trade
occurred with “the other side”. “Ahhh my phantasmic friend, I will gladly trade you 1,000 Yuan for that nearly invisible Teakwood…” Anyway- KL has a large Chinese immigrant base (Mostly from the 16 to 1800’s) and that influences the food options quite a bit. A “fast food” lunch of Dim Sum fills us up for a monorail ride.KL has a great mass transit system: 3 distinct rail lines plus a monorail and hundreds of buses. Between these methods you can travel anywhere within or without the city. The downside is they all started as independently operated lines. Not too unlike the original subway lines in NYC. None had been built with the intention of allowing passengers to slip between two c
ompeting transport corridors with any great ease. After coming under civic control a decade or so ago a few “crossover” terminals now exist. It still requires separate ticket purchases to change “lines”, but since a trip costs about 40 cents it isn’t a painful thing. (Seattle seems to be the only city that cannot make a functioning self-funding monorail line.)We get a sky view of central KL. A big part of that view is the Petronas Towers (Geek info here ) . They are the international iconic representation of KL. They exist as a tribute to the power of being
a net exporter of oil. Petronas (Petroliam Nasional Berhad) is the Malay government-owned oil company. In this country do not confuse government run with “bureaucratically bloated and inefficient”. Petronas makes good money. Obscenely good money. Beneath the towers (which until 2004 were the tallest in the world) is a 6-story shopping mall. No knock-offs in this building: Cartier, Tiffany, etc. call this home. The world's largest Mont Blanc outlet is also located here, as are the country's first stores for Hermes, Tag Heuer, and Mikimoto. (Yes, Starbucks is also represented…at least twice)Oil built this building. A large hydrocarbon chain model dominates the upper floor of the grand atrium. Another wraps around the building marquee outside. (Interesting tidbit: Malaysia
anticipates becoming a net-importer of oil by 2012.) The towers lend themselves to photos. The area surrounding it is parkland and shorter buildings with numerous locals for unobstructed stunning shots. The architecture was aesthetically planned around Islamic artistic foundations, 8-pointed stars, spirals and curves. It is easy to stare at the buildings lines for hours.We hop a light rail/subway hybrid back to Chinatown. We each had a fresh juice in hand as we walked through the turnstile. A transit officer ran up to us speaking quickly in Malay Bahasa, gesturing at our drinks and pointing at the turnstile. We had no clue. He gently turned us to point a large poster with assorted graphics and the universal red circle with a slash. Along with weapons and pets, no food or beverage is allowed on the platform or trains. Immediate 500MR fine. We immediately apologized profusely. He motioned to a trash bin and indicated we could finish our drinks there. Silly tourists…
The hotel had live soft jazz piano and fantastic tea (as well as killer cheesecake!) in the lobby lounge. We pretty much enjoyed that every day in the mid-afternoon. Another example that we are not in Bali anymore: Still adapting to the exchange rate KK tried to pay 150 MR (US$40) for a mocha and tea. The barista immediately handed back the larger note and made change for the smaller. Never would have happened that way on Bali...
KK has taken the plunge, fallen to peer pressure, joined the masses, and after years of internal
struggle and debate, finally gotten her nose pierced. This procedure really tapped into her discretionary budget. After hours of cost/benefit analysis and shopping the different piercing 
establishments she reached deep into her pockets and paid the US$2.75 to the lowest bidder. After seemingly endless seconds of preparation the procedure itself took almost half a second. The anxiety was palpable. Luckily JD had charged the battery for the camera and was able to record the entire event, beginning to end. Almost 6 shots in total. She was stable almost immediately, and has recovered nicely. The satellite dish/antennae sticking out of her left nostril seems to act as a booster for both wireless signals and TV reception. She will be able to change to a lower profile nose-stud in a week or so…We hop a bus to visit Batu Caves. A Hindu holy site 12 kilometers north of KL. Also a location for
some great rock climbing. Our gear is still in BKK, so we are just visiting the shrine. During January and early February upwards of a million worshipers make a pilgrimage to 
the caves. The rest of the year it is home to a troop of cheeky monkeys and tourists. 272 steps lead up to the cave entrance. Some of the more deconditioned visitors take an hour or so to get to the top. An impressive natural cave opens into a large Karst-like hollow open to the sky. Most all temples, cathedrals, churches, and other holy sites have a “feel” of worship and focus. While naturally impressive, Batu Cave has the least sense of spirituality of any holy site we have visited to date. It was still certainly worth the trip, even to just have that type of comparative sense for reference.We jump off the bus early on the way back into the city to catch the monorail. KK was in need of some more retail therapy to assist in recovery from her nose enhancing procedure. At a medium sized mall called Lot 10 she found an incredible selection of Tibetan Singing Bowls. She has been looking for these for years. Singing bowls are used by monks during chanting, as well as in a number of alternative healing therapies.
We enjoyed witnessing our second “Important Person Shutting Down Main Roads” motorcade. The first was on Koh Samui, Thailand when we had to wait for HRM the Princess to go to the airport. It is just like the states: A large contingent of motorcycle officers runs ahead to close side streets. A really long impressive motorcade of dark cars with even darker windows and little flags on the fenders hauls ass up the street, with well armed and armored support vehicles in the front, rear and middle. Motorcycles leap frog ahead to repeat the procedure. Street cops take about a half hour to restore a more harmonious flow to the major intersections.
The Purple Cane Teahouse is found in the classic Chinatown way: Tiny side street, hardly marked door, up narrow steps the first elevator ever installed in Asia, guess how many floors to go up while
hoping you don’t weigh too much for the lift, and enter a non-descript door into a lovely Chinese tea room. We had a lesson on using a tea tray, tea towel, and exactly how to brew the perfect cup of tea.Not feeling wound up enough from our Oolong tea, we stopped on the next floor down to check out Iyoki Coffee House. Iyoki specializes in “cold drip” coffee. An elaborate Mr. Wizard (Bill Nye for the recently post-pubescent) set up allows a six hour controlled drip of cold water to gently wash through a filter full of ground coffee. This brew then sits for a minimum of two days to mellow and become drinkable. Served in a tall glass with coffee ice
cubes. It was delicious. One of the best coffee’s we have had. Downside: It was 4:00 in the afternoon. Neither of us does very well with caffeinated beverages. Oh well, plenty of time to sleep on the plane in a couple of days.KK is getting tired of being a second-class citizen… For the past month if JD is anywhere nearby he is the one spoken to. She, while standing right there, will be referred to in the third person by any and all male speakers. JD, always respectfully addressed as “Mr. John”, and KK is “Mr. John’s Wife”. For an Alpha-chick like KK this is setting the slow boil. She gets that in Muslim culture this is just the way it is. According to a random passage in the hotel room Koran a “feisty” woman is to be sequestered in her family’s home and never let out again. Ever. For any reason. Until she dies. We would never see any of our female friends, Alpha-chicks each and every one of them… A feisty man on the other hand just needs to apologize to the village Imam, and can go on with his business. Oh, had we mentioned the Gideon’s haven’t successfully invaded Asia? Indonesia and Malay have Koran’s in the hotel rooms, Thailand has The Teachings of Buddha.
During a shopping therapy session KK had another shopper give her the “look”. The full head-to-toe slow gaze with a small Sneer of Judgment. Professor Snape with a head shawl and high heels. KK was wearing shorts, arms bare and her Choko sandals, with the audacity to be shopping inside a real store. (The local Nordstrom’s equivalent). No, KK didn’t scratch her eyes out… She thought
maybe the woman knew KK had picked up an infestation of Monkey Fleas during our cave sojourn. (OK, KK did not get fleas. She did get chomped by quite a few insects though, and had very itchy legs)The KL tower is the local Space Phallus. Turns out there are dozens around the world. Each one has a plaque giving stats and locations built into the KL viewing plaza walkways. The walk to the tower took us through the botanical gardens. Like Oz, there are warning signs about what can kill
you in the bush. Unlike Oz it is a small sign with only for critters on it. A group of traditional musicians was set up in the café area. We 
enjoyed a juice and some jams.Speaking of jams, the regular lounge at the hotel had a three piece lounge band nightly. Two little cuties on vocals and the drummer/guitarist. Classic Asian covers, Englishish (Ozzie Osbourne should have such good English...). Between sets the band made a point to meet and greet everyone in the lounge. JD was in a corner working online… He was the lone American in the room. The band, excited to have an American in the audience went all out. Unfortunately, especially for Classic Rock fan JD, they chose to honor him with a set from ABBA… I know, not even an American group (We can be very proud of that!). It was really sweet though, and done with the best of intentions. He dragged KK down the next night to meet the band and enjoy a set as well. (Closet Skeleton: We did see Mama Mia in Vegas a couple of years ago. Much to JD's horror and shame he recognized most every tune...)
Our departure from KL was smooth and uneventful. No extortion at immigration control, no last
ditch touts trying to tell us the airport was closed, all flights cancelled (except their brothers plane…), only they can take us out of the country, etc. We will be meeting our friends the Massengills in Bangkok. It is their first full family trip out of the US.Kuala Lumpur tidbits:
Days in country: 4.5 (Next time at least two weeks)
Tout count: 6+/-
Pleasant experiences: Dozens!
Unpleasant ones: None?
Photos of Petronas: 100+
Kilometers walked while shopping: 30+
# of nose studs KK has now: 4
Total cost ($US) of same: $9- including piercing process
Impression level with KL: 9.5 on a 10 scale
Public transport used: 3 train lines, two buses, one monorail
Prognosis post shopping therapy: Exellent for full recovery!
