| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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You can get mineral water. I think the assumption is that tap water is
safe, but I still try to drink only bottled water and the carafes of
drinking water in our hotels. I use the water bottles we got in Hong
Kong as canteens. They have twist caps rather than the ones we have
gotten since which once you pull off the plastic caps, you have what are
basically plastic stoppers. I also bought an issue of Asia Week that
had an article on Malaysia's elections.
I talked a bit with Steve while we waited. I can't say exactly
what made me think so but I have slowly come to understand a little
better why he is a supervisor and the rest of us are not. I have really
come to have more respect for his demeanor and personality this trip
than I had before. He is very well suited to dealing with different
personalities. In a lot of very subtle ways he is a peacemaker.
Barbara came back laughing. Apparently she had been walking on the
dark concrete walkway back. Some guy going the other way crossed over
to her and asked her, 'Where you going, Missy?' She gave him a stern
look and said, 'Don't ... even ... think ... about ... it!' He just
sort of wilted and walked away.
Off we went to the sleeper car. The train was long and it was a
long way down the platform. And it wasn't worth waiting for. We were
all right next to the bathroom, which Barbara noted. She must have a
more acute sense of smell than mine. The berths had no lights in them.
The window was either all the way open so you got a wind blowing the
curtain in your face or it was closed. There was no middle ground.
Worst of all, the rotating fan did not rotate. A very important of your
comfort was that rotating fan, particularly for the upper berths, which
Evelyn and Barbara ended up with. We tried getting the fan to work, but
it was to no avail. We pointed the problem out to the conductor.
'Lucky,' he said. 'That's not very lucky,' Barbara said. 'You
... unlucky.' Thanks, guy. I opened my window and in doing so spilled
a bottle of water on the bed. It may have helped a little but it looked
embarrassing. By morning it looked like sweat. I tried to write for a
while but the ride was very jerky. I tried to sleep, but that was
really tough also. I kept waking up and checking my watch. I remember
seeing every hour but 3 AM.
October 23, 1990: The conductor came around tapping his keys on
the bed to wake us at 6:30 AM. At 6:50 we pulled into the capital of
Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur.
K.L. is a city with a wild if not particularly ancient history. It
was established as a city in 1850 when two mining chiefs, Raja Jumaat
and Raja Abdullah, founded it and persuaded Hakka miners to go get them
tin. (Again the Hakka pop up in this log.) Eighty-seven poled up the
Kelan River to mine tin; sixty-nine of them died in the first month.
The Chinese never did have it very good in Malaysia. K.L. remained a
sort of wild mining town for several years. Then in 1895 it was made
the capital of Malaysia. As a result it looks considerably more modern
than, say, Penang. Most of the buildings are no older than those in
Chicago or San Francisco. One difference is the Islamic architecture.
You get some amazing combinations with the filigreed Moorish style on
skyscrapers. It looks pretty weird.
Oh, so it is about 7 AM and we have gotten off a hot train into the
hotter air of Kuala Lumpur. We dragged our luggage to the first
platform and the waiting room which was air-conditioned, thank goodness.
In Malaysia you get this feeling that you are walking into a wall of
comfort when you walk into a building with air conditioning. Of course,
when you leave it you walk into a wall of hot humid air that hits you in
the face.
We had hoped to stay in the hotel at the train station, but we soon
established it was closed, for renovation it appeared. Steve and I
started looking through the books to find someplace to stay. We called
one hotel, found it was no good for some reason that escapes me. We
settled on the Puduraya. (To me the name still sounds like the Puta-
rama, which is a great name for a hotel.) It had rooms in the
appropriate price range and on calling they did have rooms. The
downside was that it was over the bus terminal. It was kind of like
electing to sleep in the Port Authority in New York, a less than savory
prospect.
We grabbed cabs and headed for the hotel. It did very much look
like a modern city in spite of the seemingly incongruous Muslim
architecture. Some of the brand names we saw were also interesting.
There were ads for Brylcreme. Now there is a company I thought went
four-paws-to-the-moon long ago. Brylcreme was the original 'greasy kid
stuff.' You put this stuff in your hair before you combed it and it
held your hair in place and made it look greasy. I was still a kid when
I saw the last ads for it. Yet here it is, alive and well. I guess
some companies survive entirely on foreign markets. That's what the
tobacco companies expect to be doing by the turn of the century.
The cabs that picked us up did so making an illegal stop so we had
to rush in, so we had no chance to make arrangements where we'd meet at
the far end. Our cab left the train station first so we waited at the
cab stop for Steve and Barbara's cab. You could not even walk across
the street to the place. There were walkways over the street because
the traffic was so fast. After waiting a while I decided to scout for
the others and left Evelyn and Binayak at the cab stand. The bus
terminal was noisy and less than inviting. I had a bad feeling. I took
the elevator to the fourth floor to get to the hotel. I was amazed.
You walk into one of those walls of cool air and the hotel really looked
nice. Steve and Barbara were there already sitting on the nice soft
seats in the lobby. I decided I could live with this. I dropped off my
backpack feeling relieved I'd found Steve and Barbara and the hotel was
better than I'd expected. I went back into the heat and motioned the
others in.
The rooms were perhaps not all that fancy but they were definitely
comfortable, and after the previous night I told Evelyn that I could see
there were definite advantages to comfort. Our initial philosophy was
that we could save money on the rooms since you were only in them for a
short time each day. Perhaps I am getting older but I can now see the
advantage of having a nice place to retreat to and be comfortable.
After freshening up we went for breakfast. B&B had seen a nice
buffet in the back part of the lobby. I was more anxious to try my luck
on the street. Steve and Evelyn decided that might be a better approach
so we split up. We found a nice Muslim place, basically a shop-house
but nicer than most, right across the street. We had another roti, as I
remember. It might not have been as palatable as B&B's hotel breakfast,
but it was very probably more interesting. From there we met back at
the hotel and then headed back to the train station, this time on foot,
to make arrangements for the next night's sleeper car to Singapore. As
we got to the train station, someone walking in the other direction
asked us, 'How was the fan?' It was our conductor of the previous
night, though it took us a few seconds to recognize who he was.
It was bad news at the train station. We were all set to spring
for first-class cars after our uncomfortable experience the night
before. First class to Singapore was all booked already. 'Okay, do you
have air-conditioned?' 'No.' It turned out if we all wanted to travel
together there were only non-air-conditioned upper berths. Well, it was
out last sleeper ride. We could stand it one more night, but we were
not very happy about the situation.
B&B were anxious to hear a musical group called 'Asia Beat' which
mixed traditional Asian music with modern jazz. There was a tourist
agency right in the train station, so we went there and took a while,
while they tried to find where the group might be playing. That was a
dead end. Actually, not being a jazz fan I was a little relieved.
Next we headed out to find the National Museum, considered to be
one of the best museums in Asia. Once again it took some wandering.
It actually was a fairly good museum, though somehow I found that I
was not giving it the attention I would have liked to. First, I was
extremely dehydrated from the walk and was kicking myself for not having
brought water. In my imagination I may have been making myself more
thirsty than I really was. Also, after nearly three weeks of constant
stress and particularly after the previous night, I was just finding my
energy running out. I gave some superficial attention to the exhibits
but not what they deserved.
They had a collection of pieces of Baba culture. 'Baba' is what
they call the local Chinese culture. There was a nice exhibit of shadow
puppets from each of the local cultures. Each seems to go in for shadow
plays. On one side of a white cloth is an audience; on the other side
is a light. Between the light and the cloth, flat puppets are
manipulated. The museum also had typical Malay costumes, but what
struck me as odd was that the mannequins displaying the costumes were
all Caucasians. I guess there is not much local industry to make
something like clothes mannequins.
The exhibit I am really sorry I did not get more out of was an
optional exhibit with an admission price on the attitudes toward death
in many cultures. There would be descriptions of funeral customs and
death superstitions from all over the world: odd superstitions from
places like the Pacific islands, the descriptions of a Viking funeral.
(This is now quite familiar to me. I first heard the description on my
Scandinavia trip, but it was based on the description by Ibn Fadlan that
he wrote in 922 A.D. It is one of the eyewitness accounts included in
John Carey's excellent anthology of historical eyewitness accounts,
Eyewitness to History.) There were Eskimo burial customs and Incan
customs. There was a big section on the Egyptians and mummies. Evelyn
pointed out there was even a panel of posters and publicity stills from
mummy movies. You exit via a reproduction of catacombs from ancient
Rome. There is fodder here for a lot of fantasy and horror stories, but
we had to move on.
After a well-appreciated can of Malaysian soda--which has a sour
flavor that ours does not--we went to see the Central Market. This was
something of a disappointment. The way to judge the interest value of a
market is to look at three hypothetical shoppers:
A) a local grandmother
B) a local hip teenager
C) a tourist
You now have a scale on which to measure markets. The gift shop in a
hotel is obviously a C-market. You can have it. The market we saw when
we went one stop too far in the New Territories of Hong Kong--that was
an A-market. Walking through was a cultural experience. The Central
Market was built in 1935 and was an A-market. It dealt in produce. As
the city built up people wanted a more productive (read: profitable) use
of the space so it was going to be torn down. There was a save-the-
market movement which resulted in it being 'saved.' Saving here means
it was gutted and downgraded to a BC- or a CB-market. You can get some
traditional Malay food, but you are more likely to find ice cream and
soda. We had lunch and found the same relation to Malay food that one
of our mall pizza stands has to Italian food. I think we could have
gotten better food had we looked a little harder, even in the Central
Market. But at least it was better than going to the White Castle next
door to the market. We drifted around the market, which still has the
ambiance of a produce market rather than a mall for the most part, for
what that's worth. Not quite so much polish, I guess. The Malaysian
stick puppet I paid about US$8 for before would have cost about twice as
much here. High prices are another aspect of B-ish and C-ish markets.
The others bought T-shirts, a staple product in C-markets. |
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| Copyright © - "Mark R. Leeper" |
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