Well! For this, I am going to liberally steal for an email I sent to D, my friend from work who was doing my job while I was getting massages and sleeping. She specifically asked about the food in KL, which is why a lot of this is about that:
In some ways, I feel like I’m letting myself down a little by taking it so easy here. Since I last talked about what’s going on in KL, I have had some AMAZING food. You will probably think it’s silly that I’m not cramming myself full of Asian food, and there’s tons of it here, but KL really seems very international so there is so much variety that we don’t have in Cheesecake City!
Tuesday, Gene and I went to a restaurant called the Chalet (it was in another hotel here in town) and I ordered the seafood stuffed Dover sole. Gene had the prime rib and I thought “Damn, I could have had a baked potato…” And there was a mariachi band, I am not kidding. At a French restaurant in Asia. Okay, no sombreros, but they went from table to table playing love songs (including “Wonderful Tonight” by Eric Clapton, which they sang to a Japanese couple in which the man looked around 50 and the woman looked around 25!). We asked, but they did not know our song, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” And the dessert cart was the size of a car.
And last night was even better – we went to the movies and saw James Bond. It was in English with subtitles in Malay and (maybe) Thai? The theater was in a mall that makes The Pretty People Mall look like the ghetto mall I used to shop in in Indiana. (Seriously – every store was some huge designer like Armani, Ferragamo, Chanel, etc – I was mostly too scared to do more than take lingering looks inside, let alone go in the stores!)
Mostly, though, the parts I’m enjoying best about this are the tiny things. The radio stations here are broadcast on TV as well, with a crawler on the side where people (viewers/listeners) can text message while the DJs yammer just like in America. I love watching that in the mornings for a little while because it is all so goofy (texting? On TV?). When I watch, I can’t always tell if they are texting in Malay, English, or just that weird texting WTF BFF ILY language.
And sometimes in the afternoon when I’m by the pool I time it so I can hear the “Call to Prayer” for the Muslims at around 4-ish. There is also one around 6-ish that they broadcast on TV, complete with translation. Even as an atheist I find that very moving. When I go to the mall at Petronas, there’s a place on the top floor that is like The Children’s Museum, and some days they do tours for school children and I can see all the little children lining up, waiting, wearing their headscarves or hats.
Also: I saw a lady waiting for the Petronas tour wearing the full burqua so you can’t even see her eyes, but she must have vision problems because her glasses were outside of her burqua. If I could have taken a picture I would have tried, because it was such a head scratcher.
There is so much of Malaysia I didn’t even try to see. Just today (11/21) I was thinking that I wished I’d bitten the bullet and used the hop on/hop off bus to see some of the sights other than the malls. (Typical me!). I told Gwen that I saw the part of Kuala Lumpur they want the tourists to see, the malls, the movie theaters, the gift shops, the tall hotels. But there is poverty there, too, but that’s the part that tours don’t go past. Malaysia is a nation that wants (IMHO) western-style money and trappings, and I bet they have come a long way in the last ten years. And I bet that if I ever go back it’ll be totally different again.
I hope I go back someday. Hopefully after they move Malaysia closer to the U.S.