Avoiding a near rip-off experience, we managed to make our way into Kuala Lumpur from the airport by train, and then taxi to the hotel.

Mm. The hotel. We’re staying in the “Sheraton Imperial” (”Motha fucka!” is the appropriate postfix when making it clear that, yes, it truely is impressive to us paupers) Our room was paid for back some time ago, when we were booking our plane tickets. Luckily. I’m pretty much out of money now, and yet staying in luxurious comfort. Walking into this room was the first time I’ve actually experienced anything like culture shock. Seriously.

The weather here is tropical. Hot and humid, basically.. reminds me of Singapore, what I remember of it. People are really polite, and not just the hotel staff, who regardless of their position are all smiles and hellos and leaping to open doors for you and stuff. (As they should be! I DEMAND this service everywhere I go!)

The city is fairly young, most of the development taking places in the 90s, so the architecture is modern, and the infrastructure is ridiculously well set up. There is a monorail, along with a bunch of trains that run around the city. Everyone seems to drive everywhere, since it’s so friggin hot. (and this is like, the tail end of winter.. 30+ degrees)

We saw a bit of China town - the usual market situation, with plenty of cheap designer knockoffs and fruit for sale, saw this Islamic art museum, our exploration of which was cut short due to stabbing hunger pains. We’ve been to a few other places as well. It’s all really “civilised” and the skyline is about as futuristic as I’ve ever seen.

It’s the Chinese New Year at the moment and today there was a display of “roaring lions” in the lobby of the hotel.. red-clad dudes paired up in lion suits, displaying well choreographed acrobatic skillz. Very impressive, and convincing too. Easy to stop thinking of this lion as a suit with two guys in it, and more as a big, well manipulated puppet, or something. Twas cool. Lili’s playing photographer, now that it’s game over for my camera, so bug her for pictures.

I like this city. This is multiculturalism done properly. Hindu Indians, Muslims, Chinese and Malays all living together seemingly quite happily.

We left the country yesterday. Hopped on a Malaysian Airlines plane and flew north east to KL airport for a brief.. like, twelve hour, stop over. Dusk was chasing us for most of the trip and finally caught up with, and overtook us, somewhere over Indonesia, and it was dark as we flew over Singapore. Our bodyclocks were reading something like 2:00am by the time we touched down.

We made the snap decision as we landed to try and find a room for the night, as opposed to just roughing it in the airport which was the mostly undiscussed, half baked plan up until that point. So we ended up renting a whole damn apartment for the night. Probably not the choicest of places to stay, but it was the only place on offer at that point and we’re both far better off for the sleep.

Waking up to humidity and looking out the window to low hazy mountains and sprawling middle-of-nowhere greenery put everything in perspective, and the fact that the room was over priced and sucked suddenly seemed to be a reasonable tradeoff for actually stepping outside the airport. I’m looking forward to our four day stay at the end of the holiday, I want to see a little more of this place. Pictures of that wakeup view to follow, once I source a USB cable for my camera - had to forget something!

So we were collected at 8:30 and brought back to the airport, where we’ve been killing time with coffee, breakfast and now we’ve found internet access… in a Burger King. Rather surreal. The terminal next to me is swimming in a pool of Fanta.. and the keyboards are as greasy as you would expect for a place that serves nuggets of deep fried goodness along with their internet access, and this is a prime “real world” (as the experts would say) example of why mice should all have evolved to have lasers instead of balls. If humans could make the same evolutionary leap all would be well in the world.

In about 40 minutes we board for the second leg, destination: Hanoi. Vietnam here we come!