This was our last stop in Malaysia, since our time there was constrained by Rosh Hashana, which we couldn't celebrate at all anywhere in such a Muslim country - we even found the contact details online of a Jewish guy who lives in Kuala Lumpur (seemingly the only one in the country, and that must have been why he was listed on the website!), so we asked what his plans were for it....his reply: I'm leaving the country! So we had to get to Singapore in time, and therefore only had 2 days in KL.

I'd heard excellent things about the city, but found it quite a lot dirtier than I'd expected (although still nothing in comparison to a lot of the places we've been to). Despite that, it's still really pretty with lots of colonial buildings and some ancient trees right in the centre, some of which even feature on the tourist maps along with their ages! In contrast with the age of the trees, the city is actually surprisingly young, so a lot of the buildings were really modern, and the downtown area felt far more western than any of the cities we'd been to so far.

We got in the super-early morning queue to go up to the Skywalk at the Petronas Towers, along with a few hundred other people, and managed to snag tickets for one of the first viewings. There was a quite interesting exhibition in the waiting room, in which I learned that the towers were about 280 times my height, and then we got in the lift to go up to the viewing platform. I think both Sivi and I had been expecting/hoping for something similar to the every direction lift at the end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It wasn't much like that, but it did have 160 buttons; we were very restrained and didn't press them though. The view from the top was impressive, and almost as impressive (it would be wrong to say more impressive, wouldn't it?) was the fact that in the fancypants shopping mall at the bottom of the towers there was a MARKS AND SPENCERS! But disappointingly, it didn't have smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwiches, and it was ludicrously overpriced.

I didn't really feel we had long enough there to get to know the city as well as other places we've been to, but what we did see, I liked a lot!