The first thing I noticed when I looked out of the airplane when we were landing in Kuala Lumpur, was how green it looked. From the air Kuala Lumpur looks like a modern city in the middle of the rainforest! This first impression is exactly what Kuala Lumpur and the surrounding areas are like. Of course the greenery in the central business district is slightly inhibited by the high rise buildings and towers, but still every effort is made to have tropical plants and greenery there too.
I booked a flight to Kuala Lumpur and had organised to stay at a friend's house for the weekend and then head back to Thailand where I'd chill out on the beach. Due to my wonderful friends the stomach worms, I was not feeling too well and have ended up staying here for a week now and have been taken care of wonderfully by my friend and his family, who have been extremely hospitable.
I've experienced the Malaysian clubbing scene and party scene, as well as having been introduced to the culinary highlights of Malaysian-Chinese cuisine (which aparently due to the fact that I don't eat meat I am unable to fully appreciate)! I'm starting to realise that my trip and blog are turning out to be very heavily food related, but in all honesty I'm being introduced to foods that I've never heard and never seen before in my life! It makes me realise that though we have great food in Europe, there's a whole other culinary world out there just waiting to be experienced (there is just too much to even begin writing about here - but wow! The food was amazing).
Eating seems to be a national sport in Malaysia; people eat all the time. Going to the mall, it seems that there are just as many eateries and cafes as there are stores and they are always full, many with queues outside for hours on end! Please note that I was there during Ramadan, so a whole group of people fasting was not even present at these points in time, I can only imagine what it would be like during a normal month of the year.
As regards the partying scene, I have not experienced drinking in the manner that these Malaysians drink ever before. The idea is just to drink. So you'll go out and have a bottle of whiskey and a bucket of beer and just drink it all in shots whilst playing drinking games. I think that the concept of just going out for a beer or a drink in a what I would call "chilled out way" does not exist in Malaysia. Their idea of having a chilled night out is doing exactly what I described before. Then a party night, which I also had the pleasure of experiencing, will involve towers of beer, mutlitple bottles of whiskey, buckets of long island ice tea and shots of tequila and jaeger bombs. Whoever said that asians can't drink was seriously mistaken! Before hitting the club we went to a really nice bar from which the view of the Petronas Towers (Malaysia Twin Towers - the highest buildings in the world until Taipei No. 1 was built) was absolutely stunning, so I did do a bit of conventional sightseeing, in addition to the culinary experience I was having.
In addition to the Petronas Towers, my other bit of sight seeing was the mosque in Shah Alam, a huge building, intricately designed. It was not possible to enter the mosque itself, seeing as it was prayer time and it is Ramadan at the moment (though I'm not sure the mosque is open to the general public on any other days either).
We also went to karaoke (and not the dodgy kind), yay!! Apparently when you go to karaoke, you must do one of the following: sing, eat or drink. Normally the choice for me would seem obvious.. drink! But since I was on medication that was out of the question; eating was definitely out of the question, since I was just eating waaaayyy too much! As a result, I had to grace all those present with my wonderful singing, which at least I had the courtesy to warn people of - but even with that warning I feel that my singing was hugely inadequate in comparison to those present, who all seemed to have perfect pitch; at least they were nice about it and made me feel like my performance - thank God I wasn't singing alone - wasn't too bad.
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