Two towers and two thousand malls

Kuala Lumpur seemed to be just another big asian city at first sight. We arrived early in the morning with the overnight train from Singapore. It took us about 7 hours to arrive at KL Sentral station which is located in the middle of town. The metro system in KL is not as advanced as in Singapore, but it worked fine and brought us quick to our Airbnb. We were about to celebrate our six month on the road and therefore booked an Airbnb with infinity pool on the roof. We thought that would be appropriate for we love celebrating life. The view didn’t disappoint:

Days are hot and humid in Kuala Lumpur, and it is not rare that one gets caught in a heavy tropical rainfall out of nowhere. That happened to us when we were in the bird park. A pretty big park with approximately 200 bird species of local and foreign birds live there. In the so-called free flight areas, a huge net is stretched over the park and the birds seem to enjoy their almost-freedom.

The landmark of Kuala Lumpur are the Petronas Towers. They look majestic by night and imposing by day. With 88 floors and 450m height each, they were the tallest building in the world form 1998 to 2006. Today, they are number 7 and 8 on the list. (Seeing that list, we decided then and there to try to get on top of as many Top-10 buildings possible on our trip…).  The sight was not perfect that day, but it was still worth it.

Chinatown belongs to every big city in the world, so of course Kuala Lumpur has got one, too. I am sure that if you would wake up in any Chinatown of this world without knowing which city you were in, it would take a while to find out: they all look and feel the same! And you can buy the same fake stuff everywhere. Nevertheless, we like to walk around in Chinatowns, taste new food, watch the busy people and keep being astonished about how real all these fake watches look.

All in all, our first impression did prove to be right: Kuala Lumpur is “just” another big asian city. Not that there’s anything bad with that – except maybe the fact that there seem to be more and more malls in each city we visit. Kuala Lumpur topped them all, so far: There are more malls than we could count, flooding everything and everybody with a culture of pure consumerism. Hence, this seems to be all people do here: Hang out at the mall. All day, every day.