Mmm, Malaysia!

On my way to Dunedin, New Zealand, for 10 weeks of winter...

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia is nothing like I expected. Which is mostly a great thing. I thought it would be a lot like Thailand, since they're so near and the traditional clothes on the airplane (Malaysian Air is GREAT!) are similar, and in Southern Thailand they tell you that the food is very Malaysian influenced. But no, they're spectacularly nothing alike.

The plane landed without ever even going over the city, up out of the Sea of CHina and over meticulously groomed palm plantations (coconut I think, too tall to be bananas). Green everywhere, and hardly 10 houses close together as far as the eye could see. The airport is actually set right into one of those big palm plantations, so there are patches of trees right up to the runways. Inside, the airport is this glitzy mass of brand shopping, wall to wall salespeople spritzing you with perfume samples and offering shots of whiskey. Which makes the fact that once on the monorail that whisks you from one terminal to the other in light speed (so much nicer than the new underground at Incheon!!), you can see that all the airport buildings are low, mundane, military-esque hangars with drab green roofs that blend into the trees with such spectacular efficiency that at first I didn't realize they were buildings at all.

Everything moved in the airport with great speed and efficiency. Not to mention how unbelievably friendly everyone was. It was the fastest deplaning of luggage I've ever seen (yippee! My new suitcase survived with barely a dust mark!), though to be fair the plane was 2/3 empty. I had a round trip ticket on the express train into the city before I'd even gotten to the luggage carousel (they make it very easy not to get ripped off by unscrupulous cabs by having pre-paid taxi coupon booths and train ticket windows every few meters). And the nice young man at the info booth gave me coins for the payphone out of his own pocket so that I could call my local friend Yoga to tell him I'd arrived.

I met Yoga sometime around midnight in a dance club in Seoul in my first year in Korea. We chatted at the bar for less than an hour and exchanged email addresses and never saw each other again. And kept in touch ever since. I consider him a good friend, despite our limited real-time contact, and am DELIGHTED to have the chance to hang out with him again. How small the world is, and how wonderful!!

Yoga met me at Sentral train station, which is small and completely uncrowded and unintimidating, as I'd feared it might be. We did manage to miss each other at first, so I had to break a bill for change in a convenience store inside the terminal (a ringgit is broken up into 100 parts, just like a dollar is, though the names sound similar, so imagine the look of dismay on the face of the poor counter woman when I tried to give her a 100 ringgit note for a 20/100ths of a single ringgit phone call...lesson learned, much laughing ensued). I was happy to have Yoga there, even though all his directions would have easily gotten me to the guesthouse, since it was very nice not to have to think too much while carrying my bags and gaping at everything like a landed fish.

I should have known that they would drive on the opposite side of the road here. It is a former British colony after all. And yet it still literally took my breath away when the enormous Muslim driver in his flowy-white embroidered, knee-length shirt and traditional head covering crammed himself into the impossibly small space right in front of me. This guy was the most unlikely looking taxi driver you've ever imagined. I think he was bigger than his cab. So funny to see Yoga struggling to lift my suitcase into the trunk of the car with both hands (it's really not that heavy, but it is awkward) and then this massive guy in his pristine white reach down and literally pick the whole thing up from the front with just two fingers as if it were a greasy bag of takeout food that was mildly distasteful but otherwise totally inconsequential. He didn't say much on the drive, but when I said thank you on my way out, he replied in perfect English despite the fact that the two of them had conversed solely in Malay. This is a pretty common refrain, I am learning. It seems like everyone speaks English (leaving me wondering why Koreans all go to the Philippines instead of coming here).

KL has only 2 million people, which by major city standards is miniscule. And everything about it seems small. Practically rural. It is the least frightening large city I think I've ever been in (from the first, I mean...of course Seoul is totally unfrightening, but you don't know that when you LAND). It is very, very, very green. There are not too many tall buildings. The tall buildings that there are are not actually near each other, so there is no sense of vertical congestion. And the roads are mostly not wide (the expressway only has 4 lanes, both directions included!). My guesthouse, which is a bit beat up but absolutely spotless and with a great location and outstanding staff, is right downtown. 2 blocks from the shiniest shopping malls you can think of. This place is shopping heaven - I mean, every brand, every chain, gleaming glass multi-stories under the sun. And even here there are chickens in the street and carts of food vendors under palm trees on the corners and dirt lanes that lead to charming old clusters of two-story colonial-looking houses. The people are warm and friendly, the sky is blue (and HOT - 8am and I am sweating, sweating, sweating), and the city awaits.

Yoga and I spent the evening walking around the mall (mostly) and the neighbourhood (a little). He thought mall food would be a good lead in because even though it's twice the price of street food (about $2US instead of $1), I could see everything that's available in one go. And it's air-conditioned. I requested Malay, it being my first night in Malaysia, and he didn't tell me until he'd ordered that he doesn't actually like Malaysian food but rather prefers Thai or Indian, both of which are utterly ubiquitous. We had huge bowls of steaming, thick soup loaded with skinny, yellow noodles, shrimp, sliced chili peppers and shrimp. Mine was fish based, his peanut. His was better (though they were both good). On the side we had heavy triangles of raw tofu stuffed with slivers of vegetable and topped with crushed peanuts (also ubiquitous). Those were GREAT! And fresh fruit juice...HEAVEN!! Before getting back to the guesthouse
around 10 (we set out about 6), we'd had mango, sugar cane, cat's eye (which tasted like iced-tea), and something small and brown that he couldn't translate but that made bright yellow, sour-sweet juice when soaked in water. And that was only a fraction of the offerings. We also had an enormous plate of cut fruit (green mangoes, pineapple, guava, papaya, and other stuff I couldn't identify) served on top of crispy-fried dough stuff and smothered in oozing black sauce loaded with, what else, crushed peanuts. I have no idea what the sauce was, but it was good. Though picture menus abounded on the street, none of the food we ate there was in any of them, so thank goodness Yoga knew what to ask for.

There is a fabulous book store on the top level of the mall...I am in heaven. It was like Christmas, to see so many English titles as far as the eye could see. I didn't let myself look too closely, though I will go back. He says there's an even bigger one at the Petronas towers, where I'm headed this morning as soon as I finish this.

I'm sure I'm forgetting a million things already (oh! like the old man on the motorcycle who had whistles that sounded so much like real tropical birds that everyone, locals and foreigners alike, were scanning the trees for feathers...or the women in burqa with the stunning eyes that are all around, mixed in with the women in less-modest shawls and the women in jeans and the women in micro-dresses with more make-up on their faces than fabric on their bodies...or the hilarity of middle-aged women in traditional dress powering by on souped-up motorcycles...or the frog stew booth, yes, real frogs, on the corner near the guesthouse...or the upstairs balcony overlooking the food street where every kind of inflatable toy is swinging from an enormous tree...or the fiesty old British guy swearing at the woman in the fancy mercedes after she ran over his foot trying to fit her car through a too narrow gap in the pedestrians - to which Yoga said, not about the foot-squashing but about the swearing, 'That would have been a perfect opportunity to use the local epithet 'MY FOOT!'...), but the food outside smells wonderful and it's definitely time to hit the streets and see what this city is like in the daytime.

I am on my way by foot to the towers first, by way of the food cart across the street, and then I plan to taxi to the national mosque (which has a modern silver sculpted roof, nothing like a mosque that you imagine...which is exactly what the textile museum down the street from the mosque looks like, and used to be, I think...) which has the world's largest walk-in aviary behind it. Birds, yippee!! And then back to this neighbourhood tonight, maybe a more serious perusal of the bookstore (not that my suitcase can fit in any books!), before meeting Yoga here around 8. Mmmm, Malaysia!