Kuala Lumpur

Our first destination of our 8-days Paris trip was to Kuala Lumpur because we took Malaysia airline, and since we arrived in KL in the morning, and the plane to Paris doesnt' leave until 10pm, we spent the first day of our trip in KL. It's a really great opportunity to see what many of my friend's hometown is like. So..er.. to all my Malaysian friends, if you find any mistakes/things I can't put a name to in this post, please let me know, coz I really can't remember :P

KL airport is an uniquely designed airport in the way that there's a jungle in the middle of the airport. Later the tour guide explained that is in symbol of the great natural resources in Malaysia.

My first impression of Malaysia out of the airport was.. the HEAT!!!! It was hot, humid, almost suffocating. I was glad.. it was only 30m walk to the tour bus.

Our local tour guide first took us to this restaurant close to the airport, which was apparently commonly know as Asian Hollywood or somethign, coz a lot of Asian stars dined there before.

I couldn't help but order a nice coconut to cool down. The coconut was probably the best I've ever had, the juice was a lot sweeter than any coconut I've had. It was weird however, how on the the coconut it stated "from Thailand"... guess that coconut wasn't from Malaysia afterall.

The toilet in that restaurant is beyond shocking! it was old! not to mention the squatting toilets (horror!!!), the entire toilet was wet (in fact.. all the toilets i've visited in Malaysia are wet) and well.. think I'll stop there. :P

Next stop was the Perdana Putra, or the Prime Minister's Office complex

It's apparently built to seperate politics from the business centres to prevent overcrowding in the city. The building design is quite well thought out, like how from the prime minister's office, you can see the entire complex. The infrastructure was also designed in a way to accomodate the three ethnicities.

Our next stop was Dataran Merdeka or independence square

it is literally.. just.. a square patch of grass. I guess the symbolism is greater than what it actually is... but across the street from the "patch of grass" is the building where they filmed Rush Hour 3 which i thought is worth mention of (thus the goofy pose)

Then we visited the Petronas Twin Towers. As ignorant as I am.. i never heard of the Twin Tower in Malaysia until this trip. It is quite a masterpiece, two huge towers with a bridge (or 2) conneting the two.

A lot like Taipei's 101, there's a shopping complex right next to it.

We had about 90mins to walk around this department store before dinner, and what did we use this opportunity to do?

FOOD!!! hahaha should've guessed right? THe thing about food in Malaysia is that it's CHEAP AS!!! seriously, you woudl think food from a department stores would be higher priced than usual... but all the food we bought were really cheap. first up was some sort of curry noodles, it was really really flavourful.

Then there was laksa which was too spicy for my liking.

Then we had this char koey teow (thx c for the name) which Hui told me I MUST have in KL... which I must agree, it's really really tasty. Not sure if it's the food we ordered, but the impression I got from the Malaysian food is that it's all very strongly flavoured and tend to be on the salty side.

In our attempt to find Roti (another recommendation by Hui) we found... this... which I can't even remember what it's called, but it wasn't called Roti, It's got masala inside. This was a bit of a disappointment, maybe after all those heavily flavoured food, this comparatively was quite blend.

This was followed by ICE!!!! YUMMY

And it didn't stop there, we went for some more mango delights!

Lastly there's leh tea (or pull tea) which was another food item recommended to me. It's basically milk tea, but they mix it in a funny way (from cup to cup over an arm's distance) I have to say I can't taste anything particularly special about this tea. About few weeks later I also found leh tea in nightmarkets in Taiwan, but again I fail to er.. appreciate it as how Hui described it... I blamed it on the ppl who make it :P

And that concluded our 1 day trip in KL... next up is Tours in France