I (heart) KL

I'm going to glance over our time in Kuala Lumpur to skip to the best experience we had there.

This is the glancing part:

We spent two nights in a hotel made of shipping containers and seven-foot-tall concrete tubes. It was difficult for me to photograph well but if you’re interested you should check out their website but here are my best efforts:

KL (as Kuala Lumpur is known, I think, based on a wide swath of shirts and other merchandise) was a wild mishmash of ultra modern buildings across the street from dilapidated homes and half crumbling (partially deconstructed? it was hard to tell) office buildings and aged former skyscrapers. The Ritz Carlton was, maybe, 150 feet from derelict -- I don't know what they were -- old homes is my guess, down a street that was a mix of heavy industrial (oil refining?), outlet chocolate shops, fancy walled compound restaurants, and open lots that doubled as nitty-gritty hawker stands (aka street food, but in this case places only locals would eat). I tried to get pictures that captured this dichotomy but largely failed.

At this point in our trek even the intrepid force of travel nature that is Spectra Myers was running out of steam. The first night there we went to an... enormous shopping mall and saw "47 Ronin" in the movie theater (it's both exactly what you think it's going to be and a little bit better at the same time). The next day we inadvertently went to a Muslim old town sort of place in search for Indian food -- this foolish quest was my fault -- before being directed to "Little India," which was in a completely different part of town, by some helpful strangers who no doubt noticed how hungry we looked.

Okay, so here's the party I was skipping to.

We came up with a rule back in Singapore: the first shall be best. This was a result of walking around Singapore’s Little India for an hour in Gods-only-knows heat and humidity trying to choose the “right” place to eat. Our criteria were the restaurant has to say “vegetarian” somewhere on the sign or front of the menu but since this was Indian food most places met it. As a result we walked around in circles getting hotter and sweatier trying to choose between places that all seemed pretty much the same. Exhaustion chose our restaurant-cum-hawker-stand for us and it was, of course, amazing. Probably as amazing as all the other ones we passed by so we made the rule “the first shall be best” to save us the sweat and crankiness.

We applied this rule to the Little India section of what is known as Bricktown in KL. The first was a kind of open air place that ran clear through the first floor of building. If it had a name I couldn't tell and there was so many people crawling through he place that I couldn't figure out how it worked either. But it said “vegetarian” on the sign and dude was there to sweep us to our seats almost before we could second-guess ourselves.

Spectra and I sat across from each other at the end of a communal table and at the adjacent table there were three Indian/Malaysian kids: Big Face, Little Face, and Innocent Face (more on those names in a minute) and the were oldest sister, middle sister, and little brother respectively. I’m guessing their ages were something spanned from roughly 12 to maybe 8. Little Face (middle sister) made first contact by simply staring at us. As in gawking-style. I, of course, made a big deal of it by pretending not to notice and then throwing myself half way across the table to meet her gaze. This initiated a round of non-verbal silliness that culminated in the kids openly taking picture after picture of us. Probably more of Spectra than me. Her hair is more naturally noteworthy than mine after all.

FINALLY! Some kids taking pictures of the alien white people in their presence. Considering this had happened to me while tutoring back in Minneapolis it took its sweet time down here. Anyway.

All the commotion with kids caught the attention of two late-20’s/early-30’s Indian/Malaysian ladies who were sitting next to the kids. These ladies were laughing and occasionally translating some of the stuff were were saying for the kids. They didn't know these kids, they were innocent bystanders caught in the web of children and foreigners and thus can under the jurisdiction of interacting with me.

Both of their names started with M and they called themselves the M&M Girls. They gave us their real names too but I’m going to share them for reasons that I’ll make clear shortly. For the purposes of keeping their identities a secret I’m going to call them M1 and A1.

M1 was the one who really got into chatting with the kids, translating, and generally goofing around with all of us. She works for some sort of technology company and has a job that includes research about crime in the United States. I, naturally, “misheard” her and thought she was criminal who uses technology to commit crimes in the US. M1 rolled with this and said the kids were her accomplices: Big Face, Little Face, and (after a couple of moments of trying to think of a third “Face” name) Innocent Face.

The kids left shortly thereafter and Spectra and I talked to M&M for about 40 minutes about a wide swath of topics that included--critically for the purposes of protecting their identities--religion and politics. M&M and were both fourth generation Malaysian from Indian families. Neither has even a shred of a connection to India or people back there. “JUST LIKE ME!” I all but shouted at them. They were as fascinated by the idea that I don’t know any of my extended family members in Europe as I was that they didn't in India. Take note readers with connections to nations of family origin: we all wished we did though.

We compared Malaysia to Singapore, Tokyo, and the US and discovered Malaysians have more in common with the Japanese or the Singaporeans in the sense that we distrust our governments and they don't. Around this part of the conversation they’d always quickly glance around before saying something but I didn't think anything of it.

To wrap up the conversation I told them, “Here’s your big chance, I’m sure you've been waiting for it. Ask an American. You can ask us anything. Anything, you can’t possibly offend us.”

After conferring for a second M1 asked, “What’s with Obama and healthcare? Why are people so angry about it.” They came up with this question in, I’m not kidding, a couple of seconds.

We explained that the concept of “individual freedom” is so fundamental to Americans that we’d rather have people live without healthcare or to retain the opportunity to buy ineffectual health care than to be “forced” by the government to have healthcare that covers everyone at the cost of either not having it or being allowed to pay outrageous sums for excessive healthcare that leaves others without it.

M1 and A1 glanced at each other and then M1 said, “That seems shortsighted.”

We agreed.

Then we left them to actually eat their meals, which we pretty much stopped them from doing for near 45 minutes all told.

The next day on the way to the airport our cab driver explained that Malaysia has a very liberally applied law about talking about religion or speaking out against the government: you can’t do it otherwise you’ll be sent to their version of Guantanamo Bay. So when M&M were glancing around before saying something they were checking to see if the coast was clear to speak freely.

I've said it before and I’ll say it again: Democracy just doesn’t work. Oh, and the United States has it problems but it ain't all bad.

We gave M&M our contact information and I sure as frak hope they get in touch with us some day. Ladies, if you’re reading this, that conversation was the best thing that happened to us in Malaysia and we really liked Malaysia. So thank you.

Up Next: Railay, Thailand (the impromptu tropical beach resort portion of our trek)