My taxi driver from the airport was a cheerful chatty Indian Malaysian man, who brought me up to speed on the current state of affairs in Malaysia. In particular the realities of living in a country run by a Malay Government, when not Malay yourself. Apparently everything is weighted in favour of the Malay people in Malaysia, so Chinese and Indian students have to gain higher scores in school than Malay students, to be on an even footing. Malay people are able to buy property at less cost, and are able to borrow money on more favourable terms. However, despite our tanking economy and the embarrassment that is Brexit, taxi driver man said if he was going to leave Malaysia then London would be his number one choice of destination. He dreams of living in a meritocracy where skills and effort are rewarded fairly. Wow. Can't believe we've still got it. People in my bubble are so busy lamenting the latest Tory misdeeds that its easy to lose sight of the plus points; we still live in a society that states that it intends to be fair (even if the UK's extreme inequality ensures it mostly falls short).
As reward for my 13 hours of airtravel and to celebrate an escape from the European winter, I'd booked myself into the cheapest proper hotel (i.e. a Novotel) for the first night. The next morning, with a spring in my step and towel rolled under my arm, I descended 20 floors in the elevator to the pool terrace, for the lift doors to open to a bunch of builders standing around, about to commence 'pool landscaping works'. Damn it! Also the miserable pool was tiny and surrounded by concrete skyscrapers, obviously.
After brekkie I trotted out into the steamy heat to see the local CBD sights before transferring to a cheap-ass hostel in chinatown later in the day. An escalator up into a covered walkway led me into an air-conditioned mega-mall, full of neatly dressed consumers consuming things. I turned a corner to find a five floor atrium filled to the rafters with glowing red and gold chinese new year signs and decorations. Towering white rabbits sat amongst faux foliage creating a confusingly early Easter scene, whilst families busied themselves with endless selfies at the bottom. GONG XI FA CAI Happy Chinese New Year! I took some requisite selfies then walked out into KLCC park, full of the satisfyingly weird-looking banyan trees, overlooked by the enormous Petronas towers. I toyed with going up, but figured that the view from the top would just be a sea of skyscrapers, and decided against. This trip wasn't meant to be about cities! The path through the park led to another mall.... well, you get the idea! I found myself another covered walkway and padded back.
The Chinatown hostel was in the centre of Jalan Petaling street market. Online the lounge had looked vibesy and cool, but when I got there it was full of sullen looking individual travellers, each plugged into something, doing their own thing. The young woman on reception did the basics of check-in with great resignation, her phone on the desk auto-scrolling tiktok videos while she was otherwise engaged... Malaysia was not scoring high on welcome vibes so far.
For dinner I sought out the best pulled noodles in KL, an unassuming restaurant called Mee Tarik, recommended by friend Pippa. First impression? Reader, it was garish. Phil Wang describes this kind of outfit excellently in his book 'Sidesplitter'. White strip-lighting, noisy ceiling fans, horrible plastic chairs, a man wandering round in a dirty t-shirt and a huge bucket scraping everything off tables. What does it matter... so long as the food is amazing, heh? As a solo diner I was sat next to a young german guy who didn't want to chat, and when a malaysian couple joined the table they assumed we were together, a nice little ethnic minority moment (well, we all look the same, right?) I left to discover a queue of 20 people waiting to get into the restaurant! The noodles were probably very tasty, but I was too weirded out and self-conscious and tired to appreciate them if i'm honest.
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