This weekend, I took a road trip to KL from jolly ole Singapore. The trip was fun and cheap and filled with good times. At 10:15pm on Thursday (how I love my school Schedule with a four day weekend every week) me and a fellow exchange student, Joe, headed out to catch a train that would arrive in KL 8 hours later. I have since learned that taking a bus can take as little as 3 or 4 hours....Oops! Anyways, this train was a slow mover..a very slow mover. Every couple of hours the train would cease to move for no apparent reason whatsoever. Thankfully the babies on board chose to be quite tired allowing us to sleep for a good 5 hours or so.
Kuala Lumpur had arrived and we were ready to explore and check into the hostel. It is comforting when there are other Canadians around. After checking in I headed to the kitchen of the hostel to have some toast and a "coffee." I overheard some girls discussing Vancouver and New Brunswick. "Exciting!" I thought to myself. "We truly are everywhere." The one girl, Marina, made a suggestion that we should head to the Lake Gardens and we took this advice.
Beautiful! The orchid garden which is home to over 900 varieties of orchids was truly beautiful. This was a pleasant escape from the dirtiness of the city. It was a big transition from sterile and clean Singapore. After the garden we headed to the planetarium. Now, I had yet to feel like a real outsider in Asia until this experience. Let's just say that the kids on a school trip from a local school had more fun pointing and laughing at us two skinny Caucasians then they had learning about Black Holes in space and Virtual Reality. So much so, that one boy wanted to have his picture taken with us...of course we said yes. STARDOM!
Who knew that booze would be soooo expensive in a place where everything else is so cheap?? I mean, really, a bottle of beer was $9.00CAD. But, being pulled on stage to dance with a bunch of girls in Beyonce wigs to YMCA was something to remember. No amount of booze could help me forget that. I knew the dance from my musical revue days when I myself pulled audience members on stage to join me in my Village People Costume. PAYBACK is a BITCH!
I also had the chance to visit the Batu Caves in KL. This was great because up until this point I had never seen monkeys in the wild just doing their thang. Here they were a couple of feet away from me, eating oranges and peeing. Cute, but I guess in some ways they really are the equivalent of skunks or raccoons in Canada...knocking over trash bins, scurrying away across wires and fence posts. But, baby monkeys are really, really cute.
Malaysia had just celebrated its 50th year of independence the week prior to my visit. Now, the amount of flags there was bewildering really. I have never, ever seen such patriotism in one place...except for Singapore on National Day...WOWZA!!!! I mean, some of these flags are as tall as a house and as wide as a....well...JUST PLAIN MASSIVE!
Anyways, I came back to Singapore happy to be in a clean environment and also, happy to have seen the less clean and more chaotic, more Asian less western Kuala Lumpur. Now, to go live in a remote village in Mongolia or China.
Peace Out Ya'll,
Michael
