Day 83- Nothing Excites Me More Than A Visit To A Telecommunications Tour. Well, With The Exception Of Bruce Willis Movies.

We are SOOOO bringing some of these broads back to the hotel room.

Never being ones to break form when it comes to eating, Colleen and I hit up the ever-exotic Papa John's Pizza at the local shopping mall for breakfast/lunch.  Following up on the dreadful service from the previous night, I didn't think it would be possible to receive worse service in a restaurant.  Boy was I wrong!  It took them over twenty minutes to bring us two cans of Coke from around the corner...and that was with us asking multiple times.  I have seen a lot of people who don't give a shit in the workplace, but the service staff in Kuala Lumpur was unlike anything.  Naturally they also tacked on the mandatory 10% service charge, just to add insult to injury.



Monorail!!!!!!!!!



With that debacle behind us, we decided we needed to get out of the mall and see what the city had to offer.  We headed over to the monorail (you have to sing the word "monorail" a la The Simpsons when saying it) and booted over to KL Tower, which is one of the five tallest telecommunications towers in the world.  I can now say I have been to three out of the top five tallest telecommunications towers in the world (CN Tower in Toronto and the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai being the other two).  I know, it basically makes me a legend.  While we were there we did the usual tourist duties consisting of taking an elevator to the top, taking some goofy pictures and admiring the skyline of the city.  I must say, I was quite ignorant to Malaysia and Kuala Lumpur before we arrived and it was fascinating to see the construction going on everywhere.   There was a crane building some type of condo or office building on seemingly every block and there were luxury cars and stores abound.  It really is a city with its sights set on the future. 



Colleen on tiny people watch.



Tourists!

KL Tower.  It will never be as cool as the CN Tower.



 

Now that we had done the requisite "tallest tower/building in town" visit, we were free to do as we pleased.  Colleen decided that she needed to get her archery fix, so we trekked back to Berjaya Times Square and before we knew it we were firing arrows directly into the dead centre of the targets.  And by that I of course mean into the netting behind and away from the targets.  My girlfriend also deemed this to be her new addiction, along with scuba diving and I am still trying to figure out if these are cheaper dependencies than shopping and unnecessary baking.   Before this trip I hadn't fired a bow and arrow in probably twenty years and now here I was for the second time in a month testing out my archery skills.



There is a suspiciously low number of arrows piercing the actual targets.



After archery our plan was to hit up the amusement park, but we quickly nixed this idea when the smoothies we consumed weren't sitting too well.  We took this as our cue to head back to the hotel and relax instead of riding roller coasters with a bunch of ten year olds and barfing all over them.  Being the restless fart that I am, I cannot sit still too long in a hotel and before I knew it I was on the monorail by myself headed to check out Chinatown while Colleen relaxed in the hotel.  Somewhere along the way my non-existent navigation skills let me down and instead of finding Chinatown I found Little India instead.  Having never been to India, I can't tell you if this is what India is like, although I imagine it is pretty similar.  There was chaos everywhere, loud flute-driven music (we shall assume for snake charming purposes)  playing from many of the stores and just wall-to-wall people as far as you could see.  It was total pandemonium! 



Uh oh....



Thankfully I am allowed to enjoy the sweet sweet nectar.



 

I made it out of Kuala Lumpur's re-creation of Delhi intact, but I never did find Chinatown.  Instead, I went back to the hotel and found Colleen waiting for me to take her out for a romantic dinner; to Wendy's naturally.  We washed down our greasy burgers with a couple of games of bowling where I had to remind Colleen that men are just inherently better at sports than women.  It's just a fact ladies.



The best part of bowling is always the shoes.



Better watch out Kingpin.

To wrap up our night we went to see the cinematic masterpiece known as, "A Good Day To Die Hard".  It was not yet out in North America, which was kind of odd as most movies tend to come out in the US before they reach our fine friends in Asia.  One unique thing about going to the movies in Malaysia was the excessive subtitling.  The movie was shown in English with both Malay and Chinese subtitles underneath.  It became even more distracting when a character in the movie was speaking Russian and they then added English subtitles into the mix.  Yes, at some points there were three different languages of subtitles on the screen.  Also, many swear words were censored out in the movie and if there were any sex scenes those were most definitely edited out.  I'm hoping there weren't any though, cause nobody needs to see Bruce Willis scoring some tail.  Not surprisingly, Malaysia has some of the strictest censorship laws in the world.  In conclusion, DON'T SEE THIS MOVIE.  UNLESS YOU WANT TO LAUGH A LOT, THEN YES WASTE A COUPLE HOURS OF YOUR LIFE AND WATCH IT.



Happy Chinese New Year!



~Brentski~

Day 82- Welcome To Malaysia. Where Most People Are In Fact Not Malaysian At All And More People Speak English Than In Most Canadian Cities.

Faster than we could say "Singaporean-Malaysian Cruise" our two night cruise was over.  We awoke bright and early at 6:30am and headed down to the main dining room for our last all-inclusive meal.  In keeping with the theme of the cruise, the wait staff managed to get our order wrong and the food also happened to be rather crappy.  I think it was safe to say that we wouldn't be sailing with Royal Caribbean anytime soon again.  Making our way off the ship we had to scan our "cruise identity" cards so that they could keep track of everyone leaving and to make sure everyone's accounts were up to snuff.  As Colleen went to exit, the card machine started beeping rather excessively and everyone was staring at the two of us.  This was in turn followed by her being whisked away by a handful of employees who told her that her account had not been paid.  It turned out that Visa had decided to put a hold on her credit card, which in turn caused her to become the centre of attention for everyone within gawking distance of us.  Thankfully after a quick phone call we got everything sorted out and the crew released Colleen with her sparkling clean criminal record sheet still intact.



If that doesn't look disgusting, I don't know what does.



Now that the cruise was in the past, it was time for us to lug our backpacks across the city to the bus stop.  Luckily we had a few hours to kill before our bus ride to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which was a good thing as the two of us weren't moving too quickly with our 35-pound backpacks in temperatures that were approaching 40 degrees Celsius.  After much pissing and moaning (mostly from Colleen I might add!), we made it to the bus terminal where Colleen immediately sent me on a mission to find a magnet and post card to commemorate our visit to Singapore.  I figured this would be easy given the fact that we were near a major transportation hub.  I was severely wrong.  I marched around for over an hour trying to find her these God-forsaken mementos.  Let me just say she better not ever lose that magnet, cause I lost a lot of bodily fluids to track that fuckin' thing down!



Street feline trying to kill me!



By the time our bus arrived and started to load up a little after noon, I was looking forward to the air conditioning more than anything.  The bus had some of the most spacious accommodations  I have ever seen for this mode of transport and the seats even had some massage mechanism built into them (I couldn't figure out this technology).  The bus ride itself was pretty uneventful, minus the fact that we had to get out with all of our luggage at the Singapore-Malaysia border to clear customs.  This was definitely a hassle bitch, but on the positive side Colleen added a couple of stamps to her passport which excites her almost as much as topless pictures of Charlie Hunnam.  The bus ride ended up taking a couple of extra hours as the traffic was quite heavy due to the Chinese New Year holiday and the fact that we had our daily dose of torrential rainfall. 



I'm not making any promises.





We made it to Malaysia!



 

Arriving in KL (Kuala Lumpur) a little later than we had anticipated, the bus dropped us outside of Berjaya Times Square.  Berjaya happens to be one of the twenty largest shopping malls in the world and its vast amenities include over one thousand stores, a multi-level movie theatre, a bowling alley, an amusement park, an archery range, and a ton of other stuff that I can't be bothered trying to recollect at this exact moment.  Our hotel (Furama Bukit Bintang) was supposedly located only a couple of minutes away, although it probably took us closer to half an hour to find as we were extremely disoriented and overwhelmed by our new surroundings. 

 

Colleen seems unimpressed with one of the largest shopping malls in the world.



...But Colleen they have a roller coaster.
 

Getting in the spirit for the Chinese New Year.

Some interesting things I observed in my first couple of hours in Malaysia:

1) Since it is a Muslim country many of the women wear head gear.

2) The actual percentage of "Malay" people is quite low.  In fact Chinese immigrants make-up 30% of the population, while Indian immigrants make-up a further 15%.

3) I was ignorant to how widely spoken English was.  Just about everyone spoke English and the signs for all the stores (at least in Kuala Lumpur) were in English.

4) Our hotel room had an arrow on the ceiling pointing towards Mecca.  You know, just in case I need to make a pilgrimage.

5) It is not the easiest country to find a beer in! Because of the fact that it is a Muslim country (albeit a liberal one), all of the convenience stores that did sell beer would have signs on the refrigerator doors stating that Muslims were not allowed to purchase it.  But what if the Muslim wears a disguise?

 

Once we got settled in to our room, we headed over to the mall for some good old fashioned Western food.  Unfortunately for us we decided to eat at Nando's, where we received some of the worst service I have ever seen.  I had read that most restaurants in Malaysia tack on a 10% service charge to your bill, so none of the staff seemed to give a fuck if you actually got served or not.  I mean, like 10-15 minutes to grab me a Diet Coke that was ten feet away.  And it's not like they were busy, they just truly did not give a fuck.  We would discover in the coming days that this was par for the course in just about every restaurant  around and my patience (or lack thereof) was being thoroughly tried.

All those people and their damn "Paking".

~Brentski~