Big City Living...Chinatown Style

Well, we arrived in Kuala Lumpur on May 30th and walked around the golden triangle trying to find a place to stay for the night. We ended up paying a little more to stay in a hotel since it was only like $3 more than anywhere else and we got to have a HOT SHOWER!(I don't care how hot it is outside....nothing beats a nice warm wash!) It was our first in a couple of weeks so I felt great. When we woke up in the morning we walked to Chinatown and found a hostel which was quite a bit cheaper but had a shared bathroom and only cold water. We went to as many of the sights around K.L as we could and had a great time. We spent two days exploring the Lake Gardens, which is a 200 acre park in the middle of the city. We were able to visit a Butterfly park and the Orchid and Hibiscus garden. They were nice, probably better for those who really like butterflies and flowers though. We also visited the National Mosque, which is right outside the Gardens, it was quite big and quite nice. We met a really nice man who worked there and he explained some parts of the Islam culture to us as well as some of the history of why the Mosque was built like it was. After visiting the Mosque we made our way to the National Museum. It was very small and only had three exhibits. Two of them were devoted mainly to the history of the cultural clothing and were quite interesting. The third was a recap of a nationally sponsored team who climbed Mt. Everest. We woke up bright and early one of the days and made our way to the Petronas Twin Towers and waited in line to walk the skywalk between the two towers. It was quite high (170m) and we got a good view of the whole city, little did we know that only a couple of days later we would view the city from even higher (276m) from the K.L Tower. (It's the 4th highest communications tower in the world...the CN tower in TO is the tallest...Canada has the tallest..who knew). The skywalk at the towers was on the 41st floor and the tower actually has 88 so we weren't even halfway up! After our visit to the skywalk, we spent the rest of the day in the KLCC mall which was super nice. All of the really expensive stores like Hugo Boss, Armani and Rolex have actual doors...I think it is to deter browsers like us... and it worked like a charm because we didn't go in. We took in a movie at the mall, after waiting in line to buy tickets for 45 minutes, Pirates of the Carribean 3. It was good to get a little taste of normal life and by the end we didn't even notice the subtitles. On June 5, after visiting the K.L Tower, we made our way to the National Art Gallery only to find that it is closed for renovations, so we made our way back across the city and visited Dataran Merdeka (Independence Square) which is where the Union Jack was lowered and the New Malaysian Flag was raised (50 years ago this year). On our last day in the city, we visited the Batu Caves, where you climb 272 steps and at the top are some really cool caves and also a Hindu Temple. It was a good climb and there are Monkeys everywhere in and around the caves. There were some very interesting sculptures and it was actually quite strange because even though it was a place of worship, it was a big tourist destination. There were even restaurants and camera stores at the base of the stairs. On the 8th of June, we packed up from the big city and made our way to Langkawi another "Island Paradise".