Kuala Lumpur

I finally visited KL for the first time in my life, and to be very frank I’m not impressed. Yes, the city has stuff like Krispy Kreme and this amazing Ireland Potato with a wacky description and extremely delicious fries:

"In Ireland today there are two things in the world that can't be joked - marriage and potato."

"Ireland country tradition, serious in Potato just like how they treat marriage."

But well. Public transportation isn’t very good. Their train/light rail system doesn’t really bring people to the tourist attractions, and the lines are all owned by different train companies. It meant that to travel 3 stops to where we wanted to go – Independence Square – we had to queue to buy tickets twice and change trains once. And by that I mean get out of the gantries, exit the station, walk to the adjacent station, enter the station and pass through the gantries again.

We went into this mosque since the man at the gate was beckoning us in, and a tour group was entering too:

And then we reached Independence Square. There’s really nothing to see there except the buildings. Add the fact that the weather was so horribly hot and it seemed slightly underwhelming.

Having come this way, I thought we should check out the other buildings in the area since online guides said that the city centre had pretty buildings, museums and other sights. So we walked down the road in the blazing heat. Eventually we spotted the roof of the National Mosque:

Most of the museums nearby are Islam-related, which neither of us had much interest in. We headed uphill (it was a long walk! the map was somewhat misleading) to the Planetarium Negara instead:

There were students on a school trip at the planetarium. It wasn’t very exciting, but it had some fun exhibits and good photographs of the night sky. The Omnimax show – voiced by Tom Hanks – was really good too; far better than The Hubble that’s showing at Singapore’s Science Centre now.

From there, we decided to head to KLCC to see the Petronas Towers. The taxi ride cost 8.90RM for a longer ride than what the taxi drivers outside our hotel were trying to charge us (10RM) for the journey to Independence Square.

Unfortunately that was the only cheap taxi ride we had – the ride from KLCC to the KL Tower/Merdaka Tower cost us at least 20RM, and there was no other choice but to cab there as the nearest light rail station to KL Tower seemed quite far according to the map. There was even a surcharge for taxis to drive you up the hill to the entrance of the KL Tower!

Note of caution when in Kuala Lumpur – do not, absolutely do NOT take those bigger blue taxis as the starting fare is nearly double that of the smaller red and yellow ones and the meter jumps faster too.

KL Tower was expensive to go up – about 45RM i think – but it offers a better view of the city than the Petronas Towers as its viewing deck is higher than that at the Petronas (I heard its midway up).

It was threatening to rain when we were up there, but thankfully it never did, at least not where we were. It resulted in some stunning clouds though:

The Petronas Towers seem a little grimy from the side:

Heading back to our hotel from KL Tower, we decided to just walk to find a train station. So we followed our noses and found one after some walking – I’d say that if you were in KL, just walk everywhere if your legs can bear it and you can stand the weather. Otherwise be prepared to pay and be fleeced by the taxi drivers.

We decided to catch Thor in 3D later that evening. It had opened that very day in KL, and the night before we had caught “The Source Code” for something like 9RM each cos it was probably a cheap movie night. Thor was about 20RM I think, which was okay. Purchasing the tickets took a whopping 20 minutes in total – the printer or the computer had broken down while trying to handle our booking. The counter staff were pretty useless too – the assistant manager didnt know the password to reset the system; he called the manager for the password but he either didn’t copy it right or she didn’t give it correctly – he kept typing and retyping and pressing ‘enter’ repeatedly but nothing worked (of course it wouldn’t!). And for some reason we couldn’t just complete our booking at any of the other 4 counters, couldn’t cancel our booking and basically couldn’t do anything but stand there and wait while the staff attempted and failed to do something about it.

Eventually, after 20min of waiting, we were issued the following hand-written ticket which i had to keep in my scrapbook – and yes, the boy kept telling me to chill because i was not in the least pleased:

So well. I think my nationalistic sentiments are somewhat justified.