It was time to say goodbye to the clan Versly. They put on a brave face for 7 in the morning....
...But we all knew how they really felt. We weren't much better - it just wasn't documented!
There was some drama with Kim and Alex's flights - they had two flights through Brunei to Hong Kong, then a quick 90 minute turnaround (then a quick 24 hour turnaround in Toronto before the kids went to camp!) and they weren't allowed to check bags right through to Toronto. Fingers were crossed.
We had a less dramatic day, a single Air Asia flight from Kota Kinabalu to the nations capital - Kuala Lumpur.
No drool? No problem!
The kids are getting used to distinguishing prayer room signs from bathroom signs - handy skill in a bathroom emergency situation.
Robin was under a food watch - just making sure she ate basic foods for 48 hours to make sure her stomach was settled. She'd been taking such good care of her cupcake box, we probably should have put her sunglasses in there (they've been lost quite a bit on this trip, and replaced three times).
The airport is located over 50km from the city. They built it as part of a huge expansion in the area that they were just talking about in 1997 - an area called Putrajaya that they were attempting to turn the middle of the jungle into a digital city and IT hub. It has not helped their internet access in this country, I can attest to that.
We arrived at our hotel after a speedy drive - the hotel is quite nice. I think I may have been thinking of the dump we stayed at in Chinatown the last time we came here when I booked this hotel. Unfortunately, the family room we'd booked was being renovated, so we were stuck with two rooms for the same price! Yes, that was sarcastic.
We hit the ground running, setting out on foot towards Chinatown and the Central Market area. What a change. Chinatown was now a modern, covered street largely closed to traffic, filled with vendors of all kinds. We spotted a fruit vendor that had tons of presaged, cut up fruit so we bought 8 bags and moved on. Most of the vendors were selling knock off clothes and other trinkets so we moved on.
The central market was not what I'd remembered! It was now a two story, fully modern mini mall of multi cultural tourist craft shops. There were many Turkish, Indian and Chinese shops, scattered with the occasional Malay shop selling batik artwork and clothing. There was also a substantial food court upstairs that I'm sure we would revisit.
Outside the market, there was a very cool pedestrian street that had all kinds of different things for sale. We bought some tapicoca, rice flour, coconut and palm sugar treat that was very good - You could practically see Abby's pupils dilating from a meter away. We decided to keep wondering. We stumbled upon our first sighting of the famed Petronas Towers, the symbol for KL.
We eventually ended up at Quil City Mall....meet another very modern, huge and not very busy shopping mall in Malaysia. Beth and I had a perfect dinner - Japanese rice balls....mmmm. The kids had burgers featuring melt in your mouth beef. These malls almost have more restaurants than stores - it's kind of crazy, but we would perhaps find out why tomorrow.
We ended up going upstairs for a movie - the girls went to Paper Towns, while I opted to take a second look at Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation to squeeze out any nuances or Easter eggs I hadn't seen on my first viewing,:-). When they got out and told me the plot of their movie, I strongly felt I'd made the correct decision.
We took the monorail home - every time I see a monorail station I can't help thinking of Entrapment, the Sean Connery heist movie filmed largely in KL. We are all pretty impressed with our first half day in Kuala Lumpur. It will remain to be seen whether we'll give it the "world class city" stamp of approval, but so far, so good.
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