Day 83: Kuala Lumpur
Farewell Indonesia, hello Malaysia! We had an early morning flight from Medan to Kuala Lumpur on Malaysia Airlines – very happy we arrived safely. Navigating immigration & customs and the pre-paid taxi to the city center was a total breeze: plus 1 Malaysia!
Boarding our first Malaysia Airlines flight – gotta admit, we were a little nervous
After checking into our hotel in the Bukit Bintang neighborhood (feels like their version of Times Square – very central and busy big-city busy!), we had a checklist of shopping errands we had to get done before we could start sight-seeing, including a visit to the IT Mall in Low Yat Plaza to shop for a GoPro (to replace our broken waterproof Nikon CoolPix) and a telephoto lens for our upcoming trip to Africa. The Low Yat Mall was amazing – 3 floors dedicated to cameras and accessories! We spent a good hour there and price checked every single store before finding our best price. We got the GoPro as we needed a waterproof camera for the Borneo rainforests, but decided to hold off on the heavy telephoto lens as we wanted to stay as light as possible.
In addition to shopping for camera gear, Lindsay had another very important item on her list: wine! She searched in Surabaya and Medan for an open bottle shop during Ramadan, but came up empty-handed. But luckily KL did not disappoint – we ran into three bottle shops and found our favorite South American devil!
Shopping for some delicious vino in KL
We had the rest of the afternoon free, so we headed over to the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center Park to set the icon Petronas Twin Towers. As KL is at the equator, it was getting incredibly steamy by this time – luckily for us there is an air-conditioned walkway from the Pavilion Mall in Bukit Bintang all the way to the KLCC! We’re finding that Malaysians *love* malls – giving us a bit of nostalgia, as all the malls in the USA are quickly turning into ghost towns.
The Pavilion mall in Kuala Lumpur all decked out to celebrate Ramadan, as well as durian season! Reminds Lindsay of when she was middle-school: going to the mall was the cool thing to do on the weekends. It’s *literally* the cool way to shop in Malaysia – the air-conditioning is heavenly!
Our first glimpse of the Petronas Twin Towers
Igor posing for a pic in front of the KLCC Park Fountain – wait, what is that building in the background? Hey – it’s Citi!
We went inside the KLCC to check out the prices for going up the towers for the view, but finally decided we’d kinda been-there, done-that living in NYC, home of the Empire State Building. We headed over to the Kuala Lumpur Tower instead to see if we could book a dinner at their 360⁰ rotating restaurant. Unfortunately, we found out that all of their window-seats had already been booked, plus there was a dress-code that we weren’t quite meeting. In our hunger and over-heated state, we actually left the stupid tower without taking a single picture of it! We stumbled into a sushi restaurant down the street that had cool-misting fans and ice-cold beer to get our second wind.
Yeah, we could pay the admission…or we can take a picture in front of the advertisement and say we did!
Pictures from the base of the Petronas Twin Towers – who says up need to go up to enjoy them?
Igor is fading as we wait for the free KL Tower shuttle. We got all the way to the entrance only to turn around because we were too hungry and too tired to go to the top if we couldn’t have food *and* a view. So we ended up with no view and no picture of the tower.
SUSHI! Everything will be better after sushi
Final pictures of the towers after sunset
We decided to take advantage of our night in the city by catching up on Western culture with a trip to the cinema to see the latest Pixar flic – Finding Dory! Admittedly, not the best Pixar sequel to date, but the movie was in English (with Bahasa subtitles) – we were happy to enjoy a little slice of home before heading off on our next exotic adventure.
Ice cream! The best way to beat the heat!
Two tickets to the 8:40 showing of Finding Dory!
Sounds like you are having fun. Sucks that your camera broke. Are you missing home yet? I admit I haven’t read all your posts but I love checking in to see what cool stuff you are doing. And I too remember all those mall days we had just walking around and trying on clothes.
I think my mom is the only one who reads every post! It was a good camera – it lived a pretty long life before it died, so we’re not too upset – plus we got a great deal on the GoPro and even got the tax refunded at the airport!