KL: Day 9 & 10 

Laundry Bar - Wide
Crossing the road
Day 9 and 10 kind of blended together since I was teaching a fair bit just hours before I had to get on a plane. The very last night I made it my mission to check out the live music venue’s KL has to offer. I have to say, I went to a few and most were cover bands and that’s not really what I wanted to find. I checked out their local music magazine called KLue and it’s much more upmarket than our local street presses. It’s also not free. I was told the place to see original indie bands was at a place called the Laundry Bar. And since this was a Thursday night and that’s when the best bands perform live, I thought I’d at least get some local indie flavour. So I grab a beer at the bar, sit myself down and wait to see what’s on offer. Unfortunately I must have lucked out because by the time I got there (10ish), there was only one performer left and she sung music in the vein of Jewel. Not really my cup of tea and I didn’t stick around for very long.

Easily the highlight of the night was the taxi ride home. After telling the taxi driver all the places I’ve found so far sucked, the taxi driver asked me “You want to listen to some rock & roll music?” and I go “Yeah absolutely!” so he pulls out his CD collection from his glove compartment and starts playing his favourite tunes. All of sudden, without warning, he starts singing to the top of his lungs and dancing around in his drivers seat like a man possessed by the music. At first it starts to sound familiar but I couldn’t quite recognise the song and then 2 seconds later he goes “You like the Backstreet Boys? They’re the best!” and continues to sing along. I sit back, laughing my ass off and say hesitantly but enthusiastically “Ummmm yeah they’re great!”. I mean, what I was witnessing was freakin’ hilarious and I didn’t want to break him out of his love for the pop cheese. Then he goes “You like Chinese rap?” and I go “Sure!” and he brings out his favourite tracks, rapping along, complete with his rap moves (well as much as he can carry out whilst driving). Gold I tell ya!

So in closing, the trip was great. Great food, great people and generally a great experience. I’d go back in a heartbeat but of course, once you travel to one place, you want to travel some more and I think Europe is the next destination on my list. Not that I can afford such a trip in the immediate future mind you but it’s definitely a place on my wishlist.
KL Traffic

 
 
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Monday, May 7 2007
 
Daily Life
 

KL: Day 08 

Sunway University College - Front Entrance
Sunway University College - Looking Out
Day 8 was full on teaching at the University and the weather was getting fairly unbearable with 36 degree celsius days with extremely high humidity. The students were again great and enthusiastically took on the task of editing video footage for the very first time. Using video editing programs can be fairly daunting for the beginner but they got the hang of it pretty quickly. The great thing about the Uni is that it offers free wifi to all the students, throughout the campus. I’m not sure how many Australian Uni’s offer this service throughout their campuses but it’s a welcome one in my opinion.

 
 
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Monday, May 7 2007
 
Daily Life
 

KL: Day 06 

Times Square

Day 6, done all the sight seeing stuff so it’s time to shop. Apart from everything being considerably cheaper than in Australia (except Vegemite), Kuala Lumpur is nearly focused entirely on shopping for tourists but judging from the amount of people crowding the various complexes around the city, the Malaysians love it too. Possibly the largest complex (I found) is Times Square. It’s ten stories of wall to wall stores, with a rollercoaster starting at the top and an IMAX theatre. I wasn’t planning to see Spiderman 3 while I’m here but I had a couple of hours to kill in the arvo and since it opened here first in the world, I attempted to buy IMAX tickets. Well my excitement was short lived when the ticket attendee told me there was not one single decent seat for 3 weeks! Yes they’re Spiderman crazy here too. Hanging my head in disappointment, I did find this store selling collector’s Coca Cola. Every coke imaginable was in here from just about every country. It was both strange yet disturbingly compelling. They had blue, red, purple, yellow coke bottles, wooden bottles, tiny matchstick bottles and pretty much everything in between. For Coke collector’s this store was a dream but like all collector’s items, nothing was cheap. Most on display were over AU$100.
The Coca Cola shop
Over AU$400 for this bottle

 
 
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Friday, May 4 2007
 
Daily Life
 
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