Kuala Lumpur Weekend

This past weekend we ventured into Malaysia for a quick weekend trip. Malaysia is very close to Singapore. In fact, Singapore was once a part of Malaysia until getting its independence in 1965. For those of you who are map-less, Singapore is a city on an island at the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsula. Getting to Malaysia was incredibly easy. We booked tickets on a train, and we didn’t even really have to go through customs. I don’t even have a stamp in my passport for going into or out of Malaysia! I found that to be very disappointing, but I made the best of it and put a postage stamp in anyways.

Our original plan for Malaysia was to truly make it a day trip to Kuala Lumpur. We were going to book on two overnight trains so we wouldn’t even have to book a hostel. The train times didn’t work out for us in the end, so we ended up taking a mid-afternoon train on Friday, spending Friday night in Kuala Lumpur, and then coming home on the 10pm train (arriving 8am in Singapore). We had heard that we only needed a day to see and do everything touristy in Kuala Lumpur, so this was the perfect situation for us. It also meant that we got to sleep in on Friday morning, something that sleep-deprived study abroad college students greatly appreciate.

Our train ride to Kuala Lumpur was supposed to leave at 1pm and arrive at 8pm. We were all on the train on time, but there was an almost 2 hour delay because of … well, something they told me in a Malay accent that I didn’t quite understand. When we booked the tickets, we had accidentally clicked the wrong button and ended up in a first class car, and we were grateful for the mistake when we had to hang out on the train for en extra two hour. The car was set up with two seats, an aisle, and then one seat. The set of two seats could be swiveled around to face the two behind, so we changed our arrangement and played spades and hearts for pretty much the entire trip. We had some very entertaining games, especially when Lane went nil with the Queen of Spades and got away with it. Crazy girl!

When we got to Malaysia, we immediately had some problems. We were so late that pretty much the whole station had closed down, and we couldn’t find an ATM that accepted our American credit cards. After lots of searching (and an eaten card or two – poor Nikhil!) we finally found one that would accept our cards, and we left to venture to our hostel. We had a slightly wrong address, so our taxi driver had to drive around for awhile, and since it was dark, we were having a hard time finding it anyways. Malaysia is a strongly Muslim country, and our guesthouse wouldn’t let us wear our shoes inside. The guesthouse was awesome. All of the furniture inside was from IKEA, and the people on duty were very helpful, telling us where to go and how to get there and everything. We had a room to ourselves again, one room with 4 bunk beds (sleeping 8 people). Perfect! We hadn’t eaten anything on the train (because we didn’t have Malaysian money at the point and because the food was horrible), so even though it was close to midnight we wandered down to the Irish pub to find some food and drink. The other half of the group randomly showed up a little later (almost the whole GT crew made it to Kuala Lumpur this weekend), and what with celebrating being in another country and hanging out, the quick bite at the Irish pub turned into an extremely late night. College student that I am, I only got two hours of sleep! However, as I will point out later, this would turn out to be very advantageous.

The reason we only got two hours of sleep was that we had to get up super early to get in line for tickets to go up in the Petronas Towers. The Petronas Towers (known as the Twin Towers in Malaysia) are the world’s tallest twin towers. They are 88 stories tall and rise to 1,438 feet. They cost US$1.2bn to build in 1996 and were the tallest buildings in the world until 2003 when the Taipei 101 was completed. The towers have a connecting double-decker skybridge at the 41st/42nd floor, and that is what we got to go up to. We were about 170m above ground at the point and got some amazing pictures of the city. The towers also have a huge six-story mall surrounding their bases and are part of the larger Kuala Lumpur Community Complex. It was way awesome and was basically the only thing we were dead set on doing in Malaysia.

After leaving the towers, we headed into the mall to get lunch at the food court and write 27 postcards among 8 people. We spent the rest of the day shopping around, especially hitting up the MegaMall and its 300+ stores. We were starving by dinner and pretty much attacked our food at Chili’s, our restaurant of choice for that evening. We went through three baskets of chips and salsa in about 15 minutes! I don’t think the Asian servers had ever seen a group of people eat so much food.

After leaving the restaurant, we headed back to our hostel to pick up our luggage and then made our way back to the train station. This train left on time, thank goodness, but we wouldn’t have noticed if it didn’t. We were all so exhausted from the previous night’s lack of sleep that we fell asleep before even leaving the station. It was good that we were all so tired because we kept asleep even through the noise and rocking of the train, even including some people who didn’t fit in the beds (you didn’t fit comfortably in the bed if you were over 5’6”). We were woken up to check our tickets, show our passports to the Malaysian officials who boarded the train, and go through immigration in Singapore. It was an exhausting weekend, but it was fun.

My weekend didn’t stop when we came back to Singapore. My big plan for the day for awhile had been to head to the Singapore Zoo and Night Safari. The zoo was supposed to be incredible, and it was recommended that you spend several hours there. Because we travel every weekend and don’t have time during the week, I took advantage of the free day to go to the zoo. The Singapore Zoo is known as one of the most beautiful in the world because it is all open. The animals, except the water animals and some of the big cats, aren’t behind glass. They’re out in the open or separated by natural barriers. It was really cool. One of my favorite things was how to orangutans were out in the open, swinging across the walkways and everything. It was a really cool zoo. After the zoo, we went to the Night Safari. The Night Safari is pretty self explanatory, it being a zoo that’s at night. There are all kinds of nocturnal animals, and we all took turns walking through the ‘bat cave.’ We were exhausted by the time we got to the Night Safari, so we took the guided tram ride around the park save for our excursion to the bats. We also got to catch the Creatures of the Night show and see some really cool animals up close. By the time we were done, we were all exhausted, and I even fell asleep in the cab on the way home. It was a great weekend, though.