So, off we go! We took a 6am flight out of Frankfurt airport direct into Kuala Lumpur. If you’re thinking “wow, a 12 hour direct flight must have been very expensive” you are WRONG. We paid like 400 EUR each! Crazy.
The first destination on our SE Asia trip is Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia. “City of contrast and diversity” is written on the Welcome to KL sign as you drive in. We very much agree with this. The food, the people, the landscape, the structures all around… everything is one drastic extreme or another. Just outside the Airbnb we stayed at, you can see 80-story tall skyscrapers being built for condo-life right across from little 2 story huts with the roofs caving in. The city itself is quite new having been founded in 1857. During WW2 the Japanese had control over the area, and then the British, until 1957 when they were finally independent.
The food is very good, unlike anything I have ever had. They eat hot soups in 90+ degree weather (32+C), even for breakfast. Johannes and I are always the sweatiest people in the restaurant or street market. The locals are probably thinking something is wrong with us for being so sweaty, while we look at them in their jeans and long sleeve sweaters astonished that they aren’t! I guess it’s just a matter of what you are used to.
The first market we went to might have been my favorite. It was called the Imbi market (but also possibly called the Pudu ICC) and it was about a 25 minute walk from our airbnb. It looks like a cafeteria, with tables and chairs spread out in the middle and the different vendors set up behind counters along the perimeter. The food is made fresh. We could see the people behind the counter choppinng the meat up, folding the dumplings and plopping it into a bowl with some broth. You order what you want (we just point at things) and then sit down and after a few minutes someone brings it over. We can feel the locals looking at us while we stand around staring at pictures of food deciding what we want. Some locals smile at us, and once a woman approached Jojo and asked if I was his girlfriend and where we were from. The people are mostly very friendly here and we get the feeling that they want to help us and make us feel welcome.
Even closer to our Airbnb is an area called Bukit Bintang where the streets are filled with people and there are food stalls on one side and restaurants on the other. People from the restaurants approach you with menus as you walk by and the workers in the food stalls call out their menu items to entice you to stop and get what they’re offering. We had some dumplings here one night as an appetizer before our dinner and we had a full dinner here another night. Both were quite good!
Our first exploration into the touristy sights brought us to the Masjid Jamek Mosque, the Merdeka Square, and the Sri Maha Mariamman Temple. I was given a robe and Johannes a skirt in order to enter the Mosque where a sort of “guide” was giving some history and facts on the Mosque. We walked over to the Merdeka Square, where the Brits used to play Cricket back in the day. The Sri Maha Mariamman Temple is a hindu temple, where I was also given a colorful piece of cloth to wear as a skirt (to cover my legs).
That’s it for the first post of KL. More to come! 🙂
Stories of Exploration and Travel 