Quik Thinking

When I was in the SF bay area, I was fond of a drink known as Malaysian Iced Tea, which was similar to the Thai version. Naturally, when I came to Malaysia, I began looking around for it. To my great bewilderment, nobody seemed to serve it! I started to suspect that perhaps it was one of those recipes that was actually invented in the US (presumably by Malaysia immigrants) and didn't really exist in Malaysia. This was a disappointing hypothesis because I had been eagerly looking forward to having some while here.

Today, however, I discovered that it does exist and is known locally as teh c peng or 3 layer tea. And the reason I had so much trouble finding it is that it's from East Malaysia (on the island of Borneo) while I've been in West Malaysia (on the peninsula South of Thailand).

Yesterday I went to Malaysia's largest amusement park with my friend Siti, who gets Fridays off because she works with clients in the Mid-East. I caught the local commuter train to the station nearest the park and she picked me up there. Day passes are normally RM60 but available for RM48 to those in possession of a MyKad, the biometric ID cards issued to all Malaysian citizens. Siti used her MyKad to buy two passes and handed me one without eliciting any suspicions. 

Because Friday is a workday in Malaysia, the park was shockingly empty. I'd never seen an amusement park that empty before. Most of those there seemed to be foreign tourists. We noticed a large number of arabs, many of whom rivalled Midwesterners in obesity. While it was lovely to be spared endless queues, at one point we had to cajole other people into going on a ride with us because they operators wouldn't run it unless at least four people wanted to ride!

The park is divided into several different sections and the regular pass that we'd bought only allowed us the use of four of them but we figured that would be more than sufficient for a single day. After jamming all our stuff into a locker for which we were charged per opening, we hit up the Wild West section, where somewhat cheesy country music was blaring constantly. After a while I had an urge to throw a lasso around something and shout "yee-haw".

That seemed like a good time to get wet at the water park. I've always enjoyed water parks but the hot Malaysian sun made it even more enjoyable than usual. At one point, unfortunately, I scraped my foot against a metal protrusion in the wooden platform of a ride and it started bleeding. I was concerned about it getting infected so Siti found a store that sold band-aids and I put a couple of them on to protect the wound. Once we'd had our fill of water rides, we went to the fake beach. I'd never seen a fake beach before and was quite taken by it. They had real sand and people were even playing volleyball on it!

While we were in the water there, I noticed a impressively long suspension bridge stretching across above us so we went in search of it. It turned out to be the longest pedestrian suspension bridge in the world and, unlike Vancouver's Capilano bridge, we didn't need to pay extra to walk across it. The bridge has metal grating along the centre so that we could look down through it as we walked along, which enthralled me and terrified poor Siti, who disclosed that she's afraid of heights. Despite that she walked across the bridge with me a second time so that we could ride a zipline across the fake beach.

After leaving the beach we stopped to admire the pair of tigers on display at the park. They weren't very animated at first but when it began raining heavily they picked their lazy asses of the ground and began to play in the water and walk around. But this was only a small consolation for the other effect of the rain: all the rides were shut down. While that prevented us from returning to a couple of our favourite rides or taking as any photos as I would have liked, it was also the first time in many years that I didn't mind getting wet in the rain, since I was suitably dressed for it.

I wish to remark on a couple of linguistic peculiarities I have observed over the past several days. The first is a tendency among Malaysians to end their sentences with "la". I've asked them about it and they claim it has no semantic purpose (and was copied from the Chinese). The second is a tendency among people for whom English is not a native language to omit the final "d" from certain adjectives (e,g, advanced) when writing them. I suspect this is because the sound of that final "d" is hard to discern when spoken and people transcribing it could easily not realize it needs to be there.

Thaipusam began on Friday night at the Batu Caves just outside KL. Since it's such a big deal around here, I'd been wanting to check it out so. Various sources had informed me that there would be a huge procession across the city from Chinatown to the caves on Friday night so a couple of other tourists and I tried looking for the parade on Friday night but we were completely unable to find it. Eventually we gave up and caught a bus to the caves.

When we arrived at the caves, there were already an enormous number of people gathered there. I hadn't seen this many brown people in one place since I left Karachi in 1996! Amidst the pounding of drums there was a stream of people proceeding towards the caves. Each party consisted of a variation upon this theme: a guy with hooks embedded in the flesh of his back surrounded by a few friends cheering him on as he either trudged along under the weight of oranges hanging off the hooks or pulled against ropes (attached to the hooks) being held by a friend walking behind him; behind him would be another guy bearing the weight of a gigantic float, often with a long barb sticking sideways through his lips and his tongue lolling out in a frenzy; these two spectacles would be followed by several people dressed in yellow, often with shaved heads smeared with a yellow paste, bearing jars of milk on their heads.

We merged with the throngs and slowly made our way past the massive golden statue, up the insanely steep stairs, and into the cavern with the stone altars. We encountered thousands of abandoned slippers strewn across the stairs as we climbed them. I almost lost my own at one point. When we finally arrived at the caves, there were people offering up their jars of milk to various altars, removing the hooks from their flesh and een having little picnics. The strangest thing I noticed was a crowd of people handing little bags in at a booth in exchange for other little bags, whose contents they would thereafter burn.

We were amongst the first of over 2 million people who will attend the event over the course of this week. I came away somewhat bewildered by what I'd seen but mostly impressed that so many people were able to be in one place with barely any crowd control infrastructure and no untoward incidents taking place.

Upon arriving in Kuala Lumpur nearly two weeks ago, I quickly found myself needing to take a trip on the Light Rail Transit. Not wanting to queue up for a ticket every time I rode it, I made a cursory inquiry about more convenient forms of payment and was told I could buy a monthly pass for February but until then my best bet would be a stored value card so I bought one.

A couple of days later I needed to use the other LRT line but my card wouldn't let me in so I saw the attendant for help and was informed that I needed a different card for this line, even though both lines are operated by the same company! It was therefore no shock to me when I discovered that the monorail, which is run by a different company (rather like BART in SF), required yet another stored value card.

Yesterday one of my LRT cards ran out of money so I looked at the RapidKL website to figure out the best option going forward, since I was getting annoyed at having to use three different payment cards. It turns out that they do have two options for a unified payment system. The first one is the unlimited monthly pass. Well, they actually offer different levels of monthly pass: RM100 for both LRTs or RM150 for both LRTs and the monorail. I bought the latter for February.

The other payment system is pay-as-you-go not unlimited use but it requires only an RM10 deposit and can be topped up as needed. It also works on not just the LRT an monorail but a bunch of other random things like theme parks and such. For people who don't make heavy use of public transit (like me in March, when I'll be doing a fair bit of travelling outside KL) this system is the best choice.

Yesterday I met some cool people at the hostel: a German woman called Nadine and a Canadian couple (Mike & Bev) who went to Queen's. Mike is also a computer geek so we had a great time talking about tech stuff after the four of us had bonded over travel stories.

Later in the day Nadine and I visited the KLCC Aquaria, an aquarium whose claim to fame is that it has a giant fishtank whose floor is made of glass so you can walk below it and see the fish from the bottom. We took some amazing photos of the fish, include a manta ray and a shark with her baby hovering below.

Around sunset we walked to the KL Tower and went up to look down at the city lights. While it was a fun experience, we couldn't go outside like at the CN Tower. On the other hand, we did get to see some interesting snakes below the tower...

When I awoke this morning, I had a quick sandwich for brekki and then took the LRT over to the city centre to try and get one of the 400 free tickets to the Petronas Towers walkway that are given out each morning. Lonely Planet had suggested getting there at 8:30 to ensure a place in line but apparently the bar has been raised because the queue had maxed out by 8:30. 

A little disappointed, I decided to make the most of things and started exploring the city centre instead. My first stop was the KL city centre park, which sports the largest outdoor jungle gym I've ever seen. It also has some trees with stilt roots, which are a pretty unusual sight.

After that I walked over to Bintang Walk, where fancy restaurants line the street but only a block away are downscale ones featuring a fraction of the price. That's where I ate rice porridge for second brekki, enjoying the lack of flies in KL.

After finishing my porridge I kept walking and was rewarded by an enclave of food hawkers. All the menus were in Malay and none of the hawkers spoke very much English so I pointed at a random strange-looking fruit and asked for it to be juiced. The juice was a refreshing blend of bitter and sweet. Later on I figured out it had been starfruit.

I ended my exploration of the city centre by visiting the art gallery inside the Petronas Towers, where they had a special exhibit by a local artist whose theme was war. I loved his sculptures of humanoids wearing bullet clips in various poses.

After taking a "nap" that lasted nearly 5 hours, I decided to take a stroll through the area surrounding my hostel and see if I could get something to eat. Since it was dark and I was alone I thought that trying to blend in might be wise so I ditched the camera, water-bottle, map and umbrella. I think I managed to pull it off quite well because a couple of locals actually asked me for directions! My dark skin gives me a very working-class look here and without the obvious trappings of a tourist to give me away, nobody pays me a second glance. Of course, the charade falls apart the moment I open my mouth because, although nearly everybody here does speak English, they speak it differently than I do. In fact, it seems as though there are actually three or four different dialects of English spoken within the same city, depending on the ethnicity of the speaker. Still, it beats trying to grapple with Spanish.

Today was my first day in Kuala Lumpur. Getting a visa for Malaysia was easier than any other country I've ever been to; they didn't ask me a single question! After getting my suitcases I took the express train to KL Sentral, the main train station in the heart of the city. There I hit up an ATM, got a SIM card and transit card, then took a cab to my hostel, the Reggae Guest House 2. I was pleased to discover a bunch of friendly Canadians and Brits staying there too, which means I have people to talk to, at least for the immediate future.

I popped the SIM card I'd purchased into the Android phone Magic Dave lent me and was able to make calls, although I'll need to add more money to it before I can use it for data. The unlimited data plan costs RM 20 ($6 USD) per week, which isn't bad at all. After getting settled, I walked up the street for some Chinese food, since the hostel is in Chinatown. Beef with black pepper sauce and fried rice: not very exotic but tasty.

From talking with the guy who runs the hostel, it seems like you can see all the highlights of KL in about 3 days and then there are quite a few other places of interest in the area to explore. Hopefully I can find an apartment to rent for 2 months or I'll need to drag both suitcases around South East Asia with me.

The checkin staff were leery of letting me fly to the US with a Canadian passport but their boss overruled them and let me board. The flight was fine until we began our descent, which was the roughest one I've ever experienced and made more disorienting by the remarkable absence of urban light pollution. It was so bad that the baby behind me puked, tainting the air with a foul odour. We landed late and had to go through security again so I rushed to make my connecting flight but it too had been delayed so I hadn't missed the flight. There were 8 wheelchair users on the flight, which is more than I've ever seen before! And El Salvador actually has a potable water supply so I could drink from a fountain instead of having to buy yet another bottle of water. Once aboard I traded seats twice to end up with an aisle seat. As we took off, one of the overhead bins popped open and the passenger beneath had to briefly undo her seatbelt to shut it.

Upon arrival in SFO I had to go through secondary inspection at Immigration, although they didn't give me much trouble and granted me a 6-month visit. After that, however, I was "randomly" selected for a thorough inspection by Customs, which I've not had to undergo in the US before. The officer looked through all my stuff and grilled me for what seemed like nearly half an hour, frequently asking me the same questions to see if I'd slip up and give him different answers. Eventually he cleared me and I was free to enter the country. By that time it was about 1am and I had no cell service so capitulated on my plans of taking public transit and just paid for a cab home.