Kuala Lumpur was the most oppressively polluted place I have ever been in. We only had around 5 hours in the city itself, which was a shame, because we only saw the Sentral area, which is the most modern and most commercial and most boring. We tried to see the Indian district and visit those markets/food stands but went the wrong way and got lost instead.
So instead we walked around the Petronas towers (which are really beautiful) since we couldn't get tickets to the "swinging" bridge - apparently you have to be there by 9am if you want to get tickets. Like true b-school nerds David and I spent our time there looking at the list of companies that were in the two buildings - pretty much the usual MNC suspects.
In order to get a view of the city we went to the Menara Tower instead, which is the space needle-looking thing near the Petronas towers. From there we could see the entire valley that KL is apparently in. And we could see the layer of pollution that sits on top of the buildings, within the surrounding mountains - it even showed up on my picture! This did not really make us want to stick around much longer.
But we still had time to eat something so we went to an Indian restaurant (huge Indian population in Malaysia) and I had a stuffed roti, which sounded a lot better than it was. It was basically an omelet wrapped in roti.
That third picture is pretty crazy, I never had the opportunity to go up the Petronas Towers because 9am was terrible early! But one of my favorite moments of my entire study abroad trip was lying on the benches around the towers at 3am, admiring the view with my roommate and not one soul stirring about. Very eerie yet relaxing at the same time.
ReplyDeleteWe also walked over to the Indian cave (forget the name) but it was filled with trash and monkeys were running around harassing people...