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As most of you know, Maria and I took our summer vacation in Australia. What fewer of you know is that we had a brief and, frankly speaking, fruitless incursion into Malaysia as well.  Here's the story...

 

Our layover in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia was nearly 7 hours long. The airport is a little far outside the city so we debated beforehand whether we should try to see something before our flight that evening to Gold Coast. After printing our boarding passes for the next flight, we said to hell with it and ran for the immigration lines and headed for the city. 

 

Now, getting to the center of the city meant taking a high speed train for about 45 minutes. We went ahead and bought our return tickets and got on the train. The route whizzed by rows upon rows of short palm trees.  You could see the grid from the plane. This heavily managed land was, I have a suspicion, cleared to make palm oil plantations. This is sad, since I imagine real rainforest was here at some point. So no monkeys or exotic birds on this or any part of our journey. Also, from the sky, we could see fields being burnt (I hear this is a seasonal thing) so the skies were a little hazy. Not an attractive start to KL, unfortunately.

 

Eventually the fields give into urban sprawl. Kuala Lumpur looks like what I imagine Korea looked like maybe 20 years ago: in transition from old and run down to sparkling new and modern. There are plenty of ugly and decripit buildings in Korea, but there are just as many ultra modern and nice buildings. In KL I felt the ratio tilted in favor of the ugly, because they are still catching up. Through the haze we could make out the Petronas Towers.

 

We made it to the central train station in Kuala Lumpur. We decided on the train, while poring over a tourist map, that we should stay close to the station. We only had a little over an hour to see something and then go back because we didn't want to miss our flight. The first order of business was to get some Malaysian cash. I don't know my credit card's PIN number (I'm not sure it even has one) so after wasting about 10 minutes we finally get Maria's debit card to work. We don't have much in our checking account at home because it's mostly used for paying credit cards and student loans, so we pulled out 30 MYR, which is about the equivalent of $10. 

 

Next, we set off for a historic Indian neighborhood right next to the station...sort of. Looking at the map and at the landmarks outside we are completely turned around. We end up walking into this hotel development and around a block and head back straight to the station. Well that was a waste of another 10 minutes at least. We walk into a different, busier entrance to the station and find someone to ask directions. He says to go through the station to the other side. Ok, sounds easy enough. What we didn't know was that this station was also a HUGE shopping mall. It just kept going. And we needed a different floor to come out to the road on the other side. It probably took us another 10 minutes to get through the station. So at this point we've spent about half our allotted time going absolutely nowhere, but we finally found the neighborhood...sort of. There wasn't really a main street that we could follow into the neighborhood that we could see. There was just a row of old, kind of run-down looking buildings with a lot of Indian restaurants and shops. It smells good, and we're hungry, so we sort of hurriedly look for an easy and cheap place to eat. After walking alongside the station on the decrepit 'Indian neighborhood' side, we decide on a restaurant. The place is empty save for the two men running it and they give us a menu. Now, 30 MYR is sort of an awkward amount of money to have, we find out. Even 40 MYR would've given us more choices, so we have to be selective and make sure we don't go over. We call the waiter over and tell him our choices.

 

"Oh sorry, the kitchen is closed. We're only doing curry right now."

 

Except he didn't so much as say this as mumble it, and he started thumbing through the menu. Why didn't he say that in the first place?! I just wanted a rice dish and he kept insisting that I should have curry with it. We didn't have cash for what he said we wanted, and I was getting pretty flustered at this point. We told him we didn't have time to eat now and left. At this point, I was pretty upset. We had only managed to waste time during our roughly one hour in Malaysia. All I really wanted to do was eat something good and maybe walk past some historical buildings...these were not lofty ambitions! We started walking back toward the station where we would eat Burger King or something like that, when I said "No. We came here to eat something interesting and that's what we're going to do." We had passed a self-serve food stall on the street earlier but because there was no English we kind of kept walking. It was our only shot.  We got in line and looked at the food and asked the guys working what we should do. We filled up a tray of what we wanted, careful not to get too many things since each dish had a price (it wasn't buffet style). I ended up with some fried chicken, rice, and tasty curry. We ordered some Pepsis. The total came out to be 15 MYR, or about $4. Nice! But we had to eat it fast because we were almost out of time, so we wolfed it down and powerwalked back across the street, back across the station, down to the platform with the high speed train and onto the train. Now, we gave ourselves a pretty large cushion because we had no idea how long it would take to get through security, immigration, etc. This was a completely new airport to us and we didn't want to miss our flight.

 

We got through security and immigration in like 10 minutes. There were more immigration desks open than people waiting in line. Nice, if you're running late. Disappointing, when you could've spent another hour walking in circles in a new country.

 

So we found ourselves with a ton of free time in the KL airport. I try to make a point to visit a McDonalds in every country I go to, just because it's something we share in common and it's easy to compare. We get in line and order things that are unique to Malaysian McDonalds (I ordered some sort of spicy chicken sandwich and what they called Himalayan Tea).

 

"This is cash only."

 

We don't have enough cash for much of anything because this is McDonalds, not some street stall. There's an ATM across the (large) hallway. It's out of order. There's another one downstairs. It turns out Maria's debit card only allows one foreign transaction a day. Bummer. No McDonald's for us. There's a massage and relaxation place nearby so we walk in to see what their prices are like. They're pretty good, so we decide that we have enough time before our flight so we book two what we hope are luxurious and relaxing massages. It's our vacation, after all, and the previous few hours were anything but relaxing. 

 

 

And neither was the massage. About half of it felt good and the other half was PAINFUL. Ouch! Why are you using your elbow?!  They spent a really long time between the neck and shoulder, which is all muscle. There are no knots there! That is all me! What are you trying to soothe there?! Also, at some point in my massage the lady attending to me turned into a man. Not sure when that happened. Totally missed them switching places.

 

*sigh*

 

The trip to Kuala Lumpur was a failure. McDonalds was a failure. The ATM was a failure. The massage was a failure. This was not an auspicious start to our vacation. But everything after this went swimmingly. We had an amazing time in Australia. We just had to wade through failure to get there. And we'll always have the story of the one time we spent an hour in Malaysia going to the train station and back...there and back again.

 

 

 

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Kuala Lumpur.

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