Goodbye Petronas and KL...

Turns out we were fortunate enough to be tired and head back to the hotel early yesterday afternoon...the thunderstorms continued for quite a while and from our room at one point the rain was so heavy we could hardly see a thing out the window. We had plans to go to a nice Malaysian restaurant but with the storm and timing of our Petronas tower tour (7pm) we decided to stay closer to the hotel and went back to the Suria (mall). We were able avoid the elements (almost entirely) by walking through our hotel's convention center then under a covered walkway to the adjacent Mandarin Oriental hotel...Brian has such great ideas :) this left us only a few steps away from the massive mall...we ascended escalator upon escalator to read the 4th floor food court where we had a tough time deciding where to eat...Indian? Thai? Vietnamese? Japanese? The options seemed endless.

We eventually settled on "Madam Kwan's" a traditional Malay restaurant...we only had 30 minutes and we got our food with just about 5 to spare. I chose "plain noodle soup" which was actually quite good but definitely not my mom's idea of "plain". There were bamboo shoots, green spring onions, shredded chicken and a variety of other spices with of course thin noodles (think: Ramen). It was just what I wanted after coming into the cold air conditioning after getting wet from the rain. Brian was a little more adventurous than I was and had chicken with a spicy red sauce, dried shrimp (fortunately this was served on the side), rice, and some side concoction that we learned today was some kind of traditional Malay spicy prawn dish.

The service, once again, was pretty bad though once we summoned our waitress she was pretty quick to get us our check. We bolted to the center of the building thinking that the elevators would be faster than the escalators but they still seemed to take forever...we didn't want to miss our one and only opportunity to see KL from the Petronas towers!

We made it down to the ground level just in time to slide in line. A Muslim Malaysian woman wearing a Petronas tower uniform and matching veil confirmed our tickets and handed us blue lanyards to wear to designate our tour time. We had to go through security screening complete with metal detectors and then Brian had to (reluctantly) give up his backpack. They directed us to a narrow hallway where we watched a space age safety video of a woman projected onto mist...it is literally impossible to describe this- felt like we had traveled in time 50 years from now...We boarded the elevator and it very quickly shot us up to the level of the sky bridge (40th something floor) where we had 15 minutes to walk around. The rain had slowed down but it was still very cloudy and overcast- too much to really enjoy a sunset of any kind...




But Brian made the best of our limited view by being a jokester:




It was only about 8pm but I was so tired and could not wait to just get back to our room and relax...but Brian was all about taking night pictures so he dragged me around the soggy city centre for at least another hour...




Finally we were back to the Traders hotel and I could not be happier. I put on my PJs, the hotel bath robe and of course my fuzzy slippers from home (which Brian can't believe I packed for a trip to Malaysia...) while Brian settled in to upload his masterpieces. All in all a great day albeit exhausting. Special thanks to Mary Jo and Zave Smith for our KL hotel accommodations tonight :) Moving onward to KK!
- Posted from abroad using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia