A few days spent in Kuala Lumpur

Thursday, December 13, 2007

I'm in Malaysia, sitting in a nice hotel room on a ritzy couch, drinking Cuban rum and American Coke. Katie is off at Hazardous Environments Training with AKE. Her company may send her to a war-zone and the insurance likes to have their people run through this course before they're shot at.

Got to tell you something about Malaysia. It is a super-lingual country. I watched a reality show on local TV yesterday called "One In a Million". It's basically American Idol. All these singer wannabes wail their hearts out to be on TV and win a million… ringgits not dollars. That's around $330,000 U.S. Anyway, it is a Malaysian show, with Malaysian wannabes, Malaysian hosts, Malaysian "guest judges", and a washed- up Anglo pop star playing the role of Mr. Asshole judge. When I tuned-in the "singers" were behind a white sheet so the judges could only see their silloutte and hear the screechings from beyond. I personally do not find the Malaysian language to be very pleasant to the ear. It's an Austronesian language closely related to Indonesian, and it borrows words from Arabic, Tamil, Portuguese, Persian, Dutch, Chinese, and English. 98 percent of the songs on OIM were English pop tunes… the other 2 percent were contemporary country. Almost all of there were sung in English. The washed up pop star commented in English, the other judge spoke in Malay, 8 out of 10 of the contestants spoke English, and the two co-hosts kept up their best Ryan Seacrest impressions. The cute chick co-host rambled on only in English while the cool dude with all the hair-gel co-host stuck to Malay. Meanwhile the sub-titles jumped back and forth between the two languages. Just to spice things up every once in awhile, someone would either speak Chinese or Hindi.

There are three large ethnic groups in Malaysia… Chinese, Indian, and Malay. They all speak English. I have seen ads for "The Starter Wife", a Lifetime original starring Debra Messing, on the back of buses. The hotel we are staying at has a Hard Rock Café attached to it. Don't get me started on the Mall. There is a 4 storey Christmas tree in the middle of this non-Christian city of Kuala Lumpur. The mall, by the way, is HUGE. It's right at the base of the Petronas Towers (the highest towers in the world at 1, 482.9 ft. until the Taipei 101 rose above them in 2004). We can see the Petronas Towers from our hotel. They dominate the skyline the way the Twin Towers did in New York. Why does Malaysia have one of the tallest buildings in the world you ask? I do not know. Petronas is a petroleum company and I guess the country's economy is run on oil money, and there must be a lot of it because there is construction everywhere. The other natural resource is rubber, which apparently grows inside trees. Workers dig into rubber trees and harvest the rubber. Katie tells me there is also a lot of banking done in Malaysia. Very loose banking laws means money comes from all over the world to hide from their respective governments.

Walk down the streets of Kuala Lumpur and you are surrounded by the rattle of buildings on the rise. Traffic hums along in a steady stream of broken mufflers and huge buses. Jungle trees straight out of the Tarzan novels line those roads and hang heavy with green leaves, brown vines, and the never-ending rain. On our first day here, I got out of the shower and opened the window to our 6th floor room. The branches of a small forest of lively green trees danced for my enjoyment. No, actually, once I stopped looking at the whole and concentrated on the singular branch, I realized they are not dancing, their movements are from the ten monkeys jumping from limb to limb. Black spots of movement with long tails aiding their aerial ballet. Freakin' monkeys. I never thought I would see the like. And I actually never saw them again… at least in Kuala Lumpur.


Katie finished her training, having learned about bullets, balms, bugs, and bombs. Ask her about the "dreamy" Australian instructors. I've heard enough.

Back to the story. The intrepid adventurers are off, taking a short flight from KL (what everyone in-the-know calls Kuala Lumpur) to northern Malaysia's island of Langkawi. We got there late and went straight to the hotel. The cabins sit on stilts out across the ocean, brown wood littered with glass and drying bathing suits. Its pretty durn cool. But it's only our home for a night and then we're off to the Andaman resort on the northwestern tip of the island. On the way, we see how poor parts of Malaysia really are, but we also see the incredible mountains, lagoons, and rain forest. And don't forget about the monkeys. Our cabbie points out the window to our right, "You see that island out there? That is Thailand."

"Wow," we say from the back seat.

Then he points to the side of the road saying, "and there are some monkeys."

Katie yells, "Monkeys!" And sure enough, there is a little monkey family walking around on the side of the road. There are 5 or 6 of them just doing their little monkey business. Welcome to Malaysia.

We wind about a narrow cobble-stoned driveway that ends at our 4 star lodging. It's amazing. There is a huge open-air lobby in an oriental safari motif. And we are right in the middle of the jungle. Trees surround us that are more than 4 stories high. They are littered with vines and strange plants. The beach is just 100 yards away.

As we walk to our room, the white-clad attendant warns us, "When you are not in your room, make sure to keep your doors closed." Now that sounds like good sound advice wherever you stay, but this next bit knocked us for a loop. "The monkeys will come in your room and mess with your things." No shit. The monkeys. I never thought I would hear a warning quite like that. I love my life.