Chilling in KL

So we have ended up spending a bit longer in KL; think our energy is flagging a bit plus we quite like the place. Shopping is one of the main pastimes here and we have looked around a few of the malls - especially when it's been raining too hard to do anything else (which has been often). Plus the AC brings some light relief from the high humidity.

We have done a little sightseeing. We visited the Menara Tower, which is the fourth highest telecommunications tower in the world. We took the elevator to the top to see the city from above, which was pretty good. We also visited Kampung Baru which is a very charming residential area oddly placed right in the middle of the city with the skyscrapers as its backdrop.

A bizarre sight that I in particular have encountered has been in the public toilets. While queuing up, I managed to jump to the front of the queue as the 4 ladies in front of me refused to use the recently vacated toilet; thinking it would be really grubby or blocked or something I ventured in to discover - shock, horror - that it was a western style toilet. The aforementioned ladies preferring to wait for the squat toilets to become available. On several of the western style toilets visited, and this is the bizarre sight to which I refer, there were thick black footprints on the toilet seats. Hmmm. I'll leave that to your imagination. The only icky thing that happened while I was in a western style toilet was the lady in the adjacent squat toilet had obviously finished and was using the hose (provided in most public toilets instead of toilet paper) which actually splashed through onto my awaiting ankles. Ewww. Anyway, enough about toilets.

We met up with Alain and Loan once more and had a cocktail at the Mandarin Oriental hotel. We headed up to the rooftop swimming pool with great views over the city; when asked our room number, Alain just said we'd be paying cash. He then went on to tell us that he and Loan have actually used the pool of a 5 star hotel in Thailand even though they were staying at the very much un-starred hostel the other side of town. The key, apparently, is to look confident and know what you're doing and where you're going so they sussed out the layout the day before and watched how the other guests signed for a towel and they did they same thing themselves the next day…!

Over the past week it has also come to our attention that somewhere in Thailand our little wad of foreign notes we had been accumulating from each country and keeping safely hidden in the bottom of my rucksack, has gone missing. Pretty annoying really; it wasn't worth much but it means that someone has had a good rummage around, seen a wad of notes and claimed them .