Trip to Kuala Lumpur (KL)

My sister and I were lucky enough to take off for a few days just the two of us. We flew to KL (capital of Malaysia) and had fun shopping, site seeing and hanging out.

Our hotel was about 30 minutes from downtown. It was near the Ikea (however, to explain that to a taxi driver you had to pronouce it, Icky-ah). My sister had stayed here before and said it was really nice because it's attached to a mall. Nothing wrong with that! Here are a few pictures.

She was right that it was a really nice hotel, however, she forgot to mention that the beds were the hardest beds I would ever have slept on. When I walked in and put my purse on the bed, I noticed that my bag kind of made a thumping noise. That seemed a little weird, so I decided to sit on the bed and I let out a gasp. "Oh yeah, "said my sister, "I forgot to mention that they like their beds really hard." I was extremely surprised when I actually fell asleep and slept quite well (despite a bit of back pain in the morning). Maybe all the hard shopping we did tuckered us out enough not to care about the hardness of the beds. There really is nothing a little shopping can't cure. :) As well as the nice mall attached to our hotel meant several nice restaurants.

We shared some yummy pizza at this Italian place as well as a tiramisu for dessert!

This mall also had beautiful Christmas decorations. This was a life sized gingerbread house. Very cool. I love that it included the palm trees. :)

One day we took a taxi downtown and went to the famous Petronas Towers. You may recognize these buildings from the movie Entrapment (with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Sean Connery), the 3rd season of The Amazing Race and many other clips in TV shows or movies. The Petronas Towers are the world's tallest twin buildings.

We were told that they only issue a certain amount of tickets to go up to the Skybridge (the connecting walkway you see about halfway up), so we wanted to get there fairly early. We arrived at about 8:20, knowing that they opened the ticket booth at 8:30 am. Well, apparently others had the same idea as us because when we came down the escalators, this is what we saw.

Ok, so others had gotten up earlier than us. We were on vacation. Who wants to get up at 7:00 am and stand in line? Clearly, these people did. The tickets are free, which I was really surprised at because most touristy things cost a bizillion dollars these days and the line up actually went fairly fast. Since they only give out a certain number of tickets and they only let about 15 - 20 people up every 15 minutes, they have little monitors up telling you what time of tickets they are currently issuing. As the long line ahead of us got shorter and shorter, the time of day to go up got later and later. The monitor would say, "Now issuing tickets for 9:15 ... now issuing tickets for 9:30," and so on. We kept watching it and all of a sudden it went from, "Now issuing tickets for 10:30," to "now issuing tickets for 3:30." What? By the time we got up to the ticket booth, they were issuing tickets for 4:15 pm. It was 9:00 am in the morning.

Luckily for us, at the base of the towers is a mall. :) Could we spend all day at a mall waiting for our time to go up the towers? You bet we could!

Yet again, there were beautiful Christmas decorations and I had to take pictures.

This "tree" was about 6 stories tall. Very cool. And the wreaths were about 2 stories tall as well. The mall wasn't even open yet when we walked in (Asia time is very different than here - they open at 10ish - and that's only certain stores), so we walked outside and took the touristy shots.

We also sat and relaxed at a Starbucks (you can see the bars still on the store beside the Starbucks).

This was a very nice mall. One of the 7 floors was strictly stores that you might only be able to shop in if you were STINKIN' RICH!!! A lot of them even had guards in front of them. We did saunter into Banana Republic, but they didn't have a good sale rack like they do in our Vancouver stores, so we slowly sauntered out, trying to look like we belonged there.

The kiosks in the middle of the mall were more our speed. :) I forgot to take a picture of my loot. I did buy quite a few cheap watches and jewellery throughout this mall.

Do you notice anything strange about this Santa? Why the need to paint his face white? Strange.

Maybe they wanted him to blend in with the mall itself. Most of the walls/stores/decorations in this mall were white, which is why when we came down the escalator at one point and saw all these Buddhist Monks in their orange, they really stood out. I don't know why it looked so odd to see them shopping in Swatch. They are people just like the rest of us who need to some holiday shopping. :)

Finally it was 3:30 and we were supposed to be in the lobby of the Towers at 4:00, so we headed out of the mall. First we had to watch a 3D movie (hence the beautiful 3D glasses below) of how the Towers were built and of course all about Petronas Oil/Gas. Side note: I'm wearing one of my new necklaces in the picture below. :)

I made it onto the Skybridge!

The view was nice, but the Skybridge is only halfway up the buildings, so it would've been cool to say you'd gone to the top of the World's Tallest twin buildings. Oh well. I'm glad I did it and would recommend doing it, however, it's one of those touristy things I can check off my list and don't really need to ever do again.

The last day we just relaxed at our hotel. I went to the pool and Jodi went to Starbucks to do some reading. It was a nice little getaway for the two of us.