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Lot 10 Hutong Food Court, Kuala Lumpur / Malaysia · 2016   feeding time
 

a glimpse

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   Silence was a scarce commodity in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown. Good. Pull your surface inside out and wrap yourself around me, city, I said. The hostel’s lobby was up a skinny staircase inside a lanky 3-4-5-dunno-story building. In my room a bunch of dudes. Good ones. We were a Kiwi-chimneysweeper, a Chileno-Sandalero, a Japanese kind-heart, and a me. One gave me a gift, and one some South America, and one good words. There was liquor and laughter and maybe cigarettes on a tiny balcony I seem to vaguely recall, and a quick-dry bond held us together for some days before we parted ways.

What else… heavy, heavy rain, drops the size of water balloons, plummeting down from black thunder-skies, Dosas that were even cheaper than in India – Kuala Lumpur was suspiciously cheap in those days, somewhere around recession-cheap – and just as good, and a Quebecois instant-buddy who I surfed a wavelength or two with but never heard from again. We had talked the Chinese hostel owner out of being a racist when he refused a black guy who was an actor on a local soap, and we had talked about lost loves and such depths. Ah well. There was also a big old Texan guy and in my recollection he’s always sitting right in the middle of the lobby, all these backpacker-babies strewn like satellites all around him. He was in on the end of the world, a conspiracy king really, prophesizing that a meteor would hit Indonesia, or a mega volcano would erupt there or something, and the end was very very nigh. We had a couple of weeks. He blanked when asked why he had set up his expat camp in the immediate vicinity of such definite doom, but he knew of underground cities and trains in the US. I was in Kuala Lumpur on and off and when I came back a couple of months later, the doomsday had gone by doomless. When I found him dishing out a new apocalypse to new listeners in the old lobby, I asked what had happened to his old story and he was embarrassed. I felt bad. I liked him. Almost as much as the friendly burger man on the corner of Jalan Sultan and Jalan Pudu whose cart we frequented more than was reasonable by any measure.


Kuala Lumpur was a most underrated hub, a node all lines and travelers went through without befriending it all that much as a destination. There was no good reason for it, only a self-fulfilling prophecy – being a scandalously cheap Air-Asia hub, it was too good a gateway to be known for anything else. For those who stayed just a little longer though, it had plenty of tricks, and green, and it was yummy, and young and old, and diverse, diverse, diverse.

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a glimpse

glimpse: AF | Come sunshine or rain, dry or wet season – for better or worse, the tropics keep an almost constant solar angle throughout the year, making for eternal warmth. In the Köppen–Geiger climate classification this warrants an A, not for the best, but the warmest climate. Kuala Lumpur falls into the subcategory Af – tropical rainforest climate with no distinct dry season, which means the sun and the sky brew hot and humid weather all year round, serving almost daily rainfalls. Cloudbursts come without much of a heads up and when it rains, it rains.

food court with neon signs in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia shrouded in tropical rain clouds

glimpse: NEON BOX | There was a neon box, a consumerist shelter for junk junkies where they fed us pieces of ourselves. But the more we begged them to fill that bottomless hole inside us, the less we were whole, the hungrier we got. Until the lights went out.
 

I hadn't seen that one before, but I guess it's a reasonable method to clean a dirty chicken.
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Kuala Lumpur / Malaysia · 2015   very open flame

Frying chicken on a market in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
places / stories

 

 

 

 

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places / stories

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Kuala Lumpur / Time Travels

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KLCC, Kuala Lumpur / Malaysia  · 2015   like day...



 

 
KLCC, Kuala Lumpur / Malaysia  · 2016   ...and night



 

Time travel was but a matter of steps in Kuala Lumpur. Embarking at the sci-fi-ristic Petronas twin towers, one could walk back in time an entire century within minutes when headed towards Kampung Baru.



 

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Kampung Baru, Kuala Lumpur / Malaysia  · 2015   what money can't buy



 

Chinatown, Kuala Lumpur

 
Chinatown, Kuala Lumpur / Malaysia  · 2015   little, beautiful collisions



 

Kuala Lumpur skyscrapers

 
Kuala Lumpur / Malaysia  · 2015   building upwards



 

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia cityscape with Petronas Towers

 
Kuala Lumpur / Malaysia  · 2015   water eruption



 

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Kuala Lumpur / Malaysia  · 2015   Bonsai exhibition



 

 
Kuala Lumpur / Malaysia  · 2015   skytrain



 

One day, we left the hostel cave to check out some sort of city Grand Prix and, wait, I’m reading on Wikipedia just now that that was the first and only time it was held. Lucky me who couldn’t have cared less about its existence or non-existence and a bunch of wheels going round and round and round and round in tenacious circles.

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Kuala Lumpur / Malaysia  · 2015   the first and last gran Prix

 

 

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Batu Caves / When Your Favorite Monkey Is a Thief

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Batu Caves / Malaysia  · 2015   thieves



 

Who isn’t a sucker for a clever and funny monkey display? What most tourists didn’t realize was that this show worked both ways. These monkeys were thick as thieves, a band of pickpockets and con artists, as clever and skillful as they come. Any loose thing was a gone thing – food, sunglasses, purses – much to people’s amusement or amazement. The occasional anger fit just added to the performance. You had to applaud them.



 

Golden Hindu Statue at Batu Caves in Malaysia
Monkeys going through trash at Batu Caves in Malaysia

 
Batu Caves / Malaysia  · 2015   golden god

 
Batu Caves / Malaysia  · 2015   connoisseurs

related





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related

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elsewhere

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elsewhere

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in South(east) Asia

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