Three days in Malaysia

Our trip to Kuala Lumpur (KL) was definitely not my favorite, but it could have been worse I guess. We took a bus from Singapore over the bridge to Malaysia where we went through customs and then walked to the train station to wait for our train to KL. The train was like the trains in Thailand, but air conditioned (which was nice, but it was a little too cold at times). Anyway, the train was just slow and seemed to take forever, but eventually we made it to KL. We hopped off the train and bought tokens for the city transit train to take us to the area we wanted to stay in. We got off near Chinatown and found a place (not a very nice one, but they had air conditioning) to stay. Once we were settled, we got some food and walked around the area which was pretty cool and consisted of three market streets and an indoor market/mall with a food court. (E- We could have taken the train from Singapore, but there was some weird conversion rate going on so it was about three times cheaper to take a short bus ride over the border and then hop on the train in Malaysia. Weird stuff.)

The next day we headed for KL's most famous buildings, the Petronas Towers. The towers (or Twin Towers as they're called in KL) are 88 stories tall and connected by a skybridge and really look like they could have been built in Oz. The buildings are made entirely of shiny steel and glass that has a green tint to it. They belong in Oz... I'm sure of it. Anyway, you can tour the towers in the morning, but it's expensive so we didn't partake. But there is a mall in the bottom part that houses stores way above our budget, but we walked around in it anyway. There is also a really nice park behind the towers that has a huge fountain, lots of green space and even a kids pool. It's pretty sweet. Anyway, we hung out around the park and took some photos for a while, then ate lunch in the mall. After that we walked to another one of KL's famous buildings, the KL Tower. It kinda looks like the Space Needle in Seattle, but not nearly as cool. There really wasn't a good spot to hang out there so we headed back to Chinatown after only a few minutes there. That night we walked around the market again and enjoyed the a/c in our room.

In the morning we headed out of town to see a Hindu temple in a cave. The caves are known as Batu Caves and we took the public transit train to get there. The public trains in KL are really nice by the way. Anyway, there is a huge gold statue outside the caves, which was probably to coolest part about it. It's just enormous. To get up to the caves you climb 250-ish steps past hungry monkeys. Once you get to the top you walk down into the first big cave and then back up mores stairs to the second cave where the temple is. The inside of the cave is completely concreted with stairs and even a souvenir shop so really the coolest thing is just how big it is. There are monkeys, which some people thought were cool, but I'm not a huge fan. They are really used to people and are ready to snatch food from your hands at any time. It's kind of creepy. After we watched a monkey steal some guys juice and try to get into it with it's teeth we gladly left the crazy monkeys behind and headed back into town on the train.

We didn't do much of anything that afternoon, but we did head back to the towers that night to see them all lit up. We both agreed that they look cool during the day, but they look really cool at night. Every level was lit up with big bright lights and it made the towers look very futuristic. The following day was our last in KL and we decided to see the movie The Host at the mall in the towers. The movie was great, except they skipped over all the kissing scenes, which we didn't realize until half way through the movie. Public displays of affection are pretty taboo in Malaysia and I guess we didn't really think that would apply to movies, but I guess it does. Oh well! We still really enjoyed the movie.

 

We left that night to stay the night at the airport since our flight was really early in the morning. We could have taken a cab early in the morning, but it would have cost an arm and a leg and it was cheaper to take the bus there at night. Unfortunately, the terminal we flew out of was the worst airport ever and had nowhere good to sleep. We ended up laying on padded seats at a restaurant. We thought they would be mad and kick us out, but they didn't bother us. It was really bright in there so I probably slept for about a half an hour. Eventually 4am rolled around and we headed over to check in to our flight. Once we were past security there was a big bunch of padded benches that would have been ok to sleep on and I was really annoyed that we didn't have access to them until then. It was my least favorite night of the entire trip, but we were headed back to Thailand and I was very excited :]