Malaysia: Truly Asia (KL)

On SE Asia television, there are lots of commercials for Malaysia tourism. Much like the South Carolina ads have the tagline "Smiling Faces, Beautiful Places", the Malaysian ads have a tagline: "Truly Asia".

Well, the ad campaign didnt inspire me to visit (I was planning to go anyway), but after visiting Malaysia, I can at least confirm that the ads are accurate. Malaysia IS truly Asia.

Really tall, shiny tower complex: Petronas Towers

In the last month or so, we've made two trips to Malaysia. As Singapore's neighbor on the peninsula, it is an easy place to visit and can be reached by car, bus, train, plane or boat.
Our first trip to Malaysia, we headed to Kuala Lumpur, the country's capital. Prior to moving to Asia, my knowledge of Kuala Lumpur was limited to the fact that it had a really tall, shiny tower complex that was once the tallest building in the world and has been seen in a couple of movies. Which was enough to make me want to visit. I love tall shiny buildings. Also, big old things.




What I didnt know about Kuala Lumpur (or "KL" as everyone here calls it) is that it has great shopping (think Fifth Avenue in NYC meets Rodeo Drive. EVERY major label has a shop in KL) and is a destination for people around Asia to vacation. While there, we saw several other Westerners and also lots of Arab people.Malaysia - especially KL - has a high Muslim population and attracts Muslims from other parts of the world to visit. 

Me outside the towers

What I find interesting is the juxtaposition of these  things. For example, we were strolling through the mall (adjacent to the Petronas towers) and saw stores targeting the "modern Muslim woman" with robes and head wraps in festive prints. But then we also saw woman in full birkas carrying bags from expensive stores. Does she wear fancy clothes under her birka, like in the (just plain awful) second Sex & The City movie? Does she wear them at home? Were the items gifts? Maybe the bags were all for her husband? 

As I'm tooling around town in my J. Crew seersucker shorts and Old Navy tank top, I wonder what these people think of me, with my exposed white skin and North American accent.....

Anyhoo.

The line for towers tickets

Me in the basement of the towers,
next to a scale model of the towers.

KL had big shiny towers. The Petronas Towers, home to the Petronas oil & gas company (among other companies) is a mixed-use building on offices, restaurants and retail. The aforementioned mall is attached to the towers. They sell tickets to the observation decks at 40 and 80 floors up, which was something I REALLY wanted to do. We'd heard that they sell out of tickets pretty fast, so we went to the towers straight away. No dice; they were already sold out. The helpful ticket agent told us to try again the next day, that the doors opened at 9, but people queued up earlier than that. So we went on about our day, exploring the city and made plans to return. Despite getting in line at 7:50am, we were too far back in line to get tickets to the observation deck before our bus back to Singapore.*

So we didnt go up the Petronas Towers, but we visited the KL tower (another awesome, tall shiny thing with a revolving restaurant in the top) and the top floor lounge of our hotel, which faced the Petronas Towers. We got to see plenty of beautiful KL skyline during the day and evening. We also saw Merdeka Square, the site of Malaysia's first independence rally in 1957 and saw such a beautiful mix or architecture style, inspired by the Middle East as well as European settlers.

  

 

Merdeka Square

The hotel bar

An awesome diorama of the city, on display in the KL
City Gallery.

The hotel bar

*Due to some...uh...travel snafus we had more time in KL than we thought and might could have gotten tix up the towers. Something about thinking our bus was at 12:30pm and really it was at 12:30am and we missed it and had to book last minute tix on an overnight train back to Singapore....but yeah.