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Kuala Lumpur, Sepang, part 2
We flew overnight into Malaysia, and although much of the team was tired, we all managed to load up in the hotel shuttle bus and take a ride into Kuala Lumpur. It was a horrible ride because the driver was constantly tailgating and then stomping on the brakes hard enough to throw us out of our seats! Think that's bad? The bus driver was about a half hour late to pick everyone up and take us back to the hotel at 8:30 PM that night, and it turned out he had been driving drunk so the police held him until he sobered up. There were an awful lot of these flags around.
I'm assuming this is another hotel we passedo n the way to the city. There's a very diverse culture in Malaysia, with people from all over living in close quarters here. Indian, Malay, Chinese, you name it.
Here's the signage at the toll booths everyone has to pass through to get in or out of the city. I imagine this in the Beavis voice. Heh heh.
A little shout out to my gibbons from Dunlop.
This next photo is for my mom! There's a huge shopping area here called Chu Lan square, and even though this is a rather simple photo of an awning, the real place is big and very stylish. There's a statue of a giant piece of rock with the word Chu Lan carved in it, and yes, it was square.
The team naturally wanted to eat Italian, so we found a small place. I wanted to get to the real deal, so I just had a piece of garlic bread - with big pieces of garlic on it!
I split off from the crew and found a food court on the sixth floor of an electronics mall. Every place was "scratch-built", and a little crusty, and some of the cooks were wearing rice-picker type clothing, rolled up pants, slippers, you know the deal. But the food rocked.
And I found my favorite Soy Bean drink! When I was a kid, a glass bigger than this was about a nickel, but here it was 1.30 Riggits (Malay money) which translated to about 35 cents or so.
This is part of the downtown area. All the prices on everything are fake, and you can bargain like hell for whatever you want. You even barter with the taxi drivers before you get in. It's unreal. I'm sure there are foreigner rates and local rates, but I think because I look mixed I had an easier time than the rest of my team. It seemed like the Malays spoke better English than most of the GP paddock.
SCORE!!!
I got it for a good price after bargaining for two hours and criss-crossing the mall several times, pitting one vendor against another. I'd like to think I wore them out, but they probably got a kick out of me walking back and forth, thinking, hahaha guai-lo!
