I saw the world's largest gold statue of Lord Murugan!!!!

Hi again,
Its Friday night here in Kuala Lumpur. The past couple of days have been fun, I've seen quite a bit.
It's amazing how fast this city is growing. You see a lot of tearing down the old and building up the new. It's a very tall city, there's high rises everywhere.

On Wednesday, my roommate from the dorm, and I walked around the city a biut more. We went up the KL tower, a very tall communications tower. It has an observation deck which allows for awesome views of the city. It was cool to see the whole city and beyond, it's flanked by mountains which makes for a spectacular sight. Unfortunately, it was a bit hazy. I wouldn't say the air quality here is really bad, but it can be less than optimal. Being next to traffic can be unpleasant, especially when there's a pack of motorcycles (a lot of people have them, and they always make their way to the front of traffic at a red light. When they take off they throw off horrible exhaust). We also visited Chinatown and Little India, which were both a bit of a letdown. Chinatown is centered around Petaling Street, which is nothing more than a street to buy items with a brand name (It's apparent the LA Lakers aren't getting royalty checks for their jerseys sold here). It has all the stuff like "Rolex" (stress on the quotations) and so on, not really my thing. Little India was pretty much non-existent.

We also visited Merdeka Square, which was a huge grass covered area with lots of flags. It wasn't too exciting. However, I must say, the Malaysian Flag is quite beautiful, and quite familiar looking. Here's a picture Malaysian Flag

I can't even remember what I ate that day. I do know we had lunch at a Malay Hawker Centre. To be honest, Malay food hasn't been my favorite, with a noteable exception for satay. However, I do love the Chinese and Indian food here.

Yesterday, Thursday, we visited the Batu Caves. They're just a bit outside the city. The Batu Caves are a holy site for Hindus. During the Festival of Thaipusam, about 1 million people visit the caves. It is quite spectacular there.

When you get there, you see an enormous gold statue of Lord Murugan, 42 meters tall. Then you see the stairs. There's 272 of them, the entrance to the caves is in the side of a cliff, but not at ground level. You need to climb the stairs to enter. One other thing, there's monkeys. Lots and lots of monkeys. They feed of fruit that people give them, as well as rubbish, a lot are playing with plastic water bottles and such. The caves (they're very, very large) are cool. There's statues inside (and a few dozen more stairs). It was all fun to see. However, the monkey are the best part. They all run around, acting like, well, like monkeys. They fight and play. There's tiny baby monkeys clutching onto their mothers as the mothers walk around. One person gave a banana to one. Watching a monkey actually eat a banana is quite funny. They do a perfect job of peeling it down as they eat it, just like you would see in a cartoon. On the way back down one chased me, it was eyeing my water bottle. It eventually gave up.

We headed back into the city and got lunch. That was really good, Chinese style barbecue pork with rice. I like pork, I like barbecueing, I like rice. I liked that dish. The pork was super tender, juicy and sweet. It also had crisped up a bit on the outside, just slightly. And it had plenty of fat, and pork fat is awesome.

Later, we went to the Lake Gardens. They were quite boring, a lot of it was under construction.

Last evening we headed out to a street near the hostel we heard about, filled with street stalls. I had a good bowl of noodles with bits of meat and mushrooms and bokchoy and dumplings, very good.

Today was really spent chilling out, it seems, in talking to the people working at the hostel, I've seen most of what the city has to see. I did head out on the Monorail to a neighborhood the receptionist mentioned. It's more of a Little India than Little India. Unlike the other boring Little India in KL, this one had lots of shops and restaurants and markets and such. I had lunch at a banana leaf restaurant (they're very popular with the Indian community). I think they guy there was having fun filling my banana leaf with food. It's an all you can eat type deal. And he kept dumping food on my leaf, even though I tried to refuse. He was kinda chuckling. Needless to say I couldnt finish, but I did give it my best.

Now I'm back here hanging out. I'm sure I'll find something for tommorow. On Sunday I leave for Kota Bharu (I originally thought I was leaving Saturday).

I'll try to get up more photos soon.

Take it easy,
Mike