Merry Christmas to me!!
Christmas morning I woke up bright and early to catch a bus to Incheon Airport with Liz and Ryan. The flight was awesome. They had the Columbus Blue Jacket's (hockey) game on, so I got to watch my team loose by one point in a shoot out. They also served tons of food, they had the normal airline dinner, followed by ice cream, tea and coffee, pizza as a snack later, peanuts and drinks-this was only a 7 hour flight! Finally arrived in Kuala Lumpur Airport around 11 that night. In the airport they have a desk where you can get a budget taxi to wherever you are going, so we paid 75 Ringgit for a taxi to the hostel. So we're driving along enjoying the new scenery and about an hour later the driver drops us off on a main street and tells us the hostel is just to left of us down the alley. "Just go straight, you'll see it". Ok, fine so we just walk a minute and it's just around the corner, right? NO! The damn driver dropped us off and sent us into the middle of China town a few blocks away from the hostel. It's after midnight, nothing is open, we're in the middle of a foreign city with no idea where we are. I would also like to add that the streets were disgusting-trash everywhere, it smelled, rats running all over the place, and the stray cats were abnormally large and muscular. So we walk down the main alley of Chinatown, get to another road that runs perpendicular and just decide to turn right and start wandering. Luckily we just kinda stumbled upon the street we needed, good thing they use the Roman alphabet or we wouldn't have had a chance of finding it. We turned down the road and had to walk about 5 blocks before finally finding it-mind you this is after we had turned around, ended up back on the main road we started out on and turned around again. So, around 1, maybe 2 we found the hostel "Back Home". It was a decent place- air conditioned rooms, nice bathrooms, clean, coffee tea and toast for breakfast.
Saturday morning we went to the Batu Caves. It was easy to get to, got on a bus about 2 blocks away from the hostel and it took us right there. When you get there you see the main gate which is decorated with Hindu gods. You walk through the gate and the parking lot and you just see the 272 steps that lead up to the caves and the 50foot statue of Hanuman. As you are climbing up the stairs there are monkeys all around searching for food. We saw a woman's food get stolen just after she bought it from a stand haha.
Once you finally get up the stairs you go into the cave, the first part is just a big cave opening, you walk through and on the other side you reach a smaller cave, which has a small Hindu temple inside. It was really pretty and I loved being able to watch the puja(worship ceremony) that was taking place. And still, you had monkeys walking around trying to get food from the tourists. On the way out I bought a nice little Ganesha wall hanging ^_^ haha, Liz and I also got stopped by two guys who wanted their picture taken with us.
There is another temple outside of the caves and another large statue, neither of which are as interesting or impressive as the first ones.
We went out and took the bus back into the city, wandered into a Malaysian "Restaraun" and got chicken for lunch. You would think we'd be safe ordering chicken right? wrong again. It was served with rice and gravy which was really good, but the chicken itself looked like parts of the chicken I didn't want to (nor did I actually) eat. Maybe it was a large blood vessel, maybe around the spine or neck? Still I'm not sure, it looked gross and the blood was congealed inside the meat.
Then we made our way to the Kuala Lumpur Tower. It's a neat tower, but a bit expensive to get inside. It cost 40 Ringgits, but included the observation deck and an animal exhibit. It's 421 meters tall, and the fifth tallest freestanding tower in the world. We had a great view of the city and of the nearby Patronas towers. The animal exhibit wasn't great, it was mostly full of snakes and spiders, had a few raccoons and some birds. It started to storm so we made our way down the hill through the "jungle in the city" which was pretty neat, and ran back to the hostel which was only about 15 minutes away.
We left the hostel a few hours later for dinner. 15 subway stops and 2 hours later we finally go to city center. haha. We first took the wrong subway line (both directions!) before we figured out that there were 2 subway stations on the same corner, but one is located behind the other and it's easy to miss. We came out under the Patronas Twin Towers, they are the world's tallest twin towers and were the tallest towers until 2004 before Taipai 101 took the title. The towers are really pretty, with alternating layers of colors of black, white, and green and a design that alternates between semicircles and corners. Entrance is free, but we got there too late to be able to go up. It's really neat looking from the outside though, especially at night. We also found a Chilis!!! Best meal I've had in months!! Left full and happy for a good night sleep before our flight the next morning.
