First non-Europe post!
4/20: This was mostly a travel day, lost to the 10 hour flight from Istanbul to Malaysia. I got to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport around 5PM local time, and then spent about an hour more figuring out how to get from the airport into Kuala Lumpur itself, which is about 60km from the city’s center. Google thought it would take 6 hours, but it didn’t seem to know about the express train between the airport and city center, which only took 30 minutes!
As I drew closer to my hostel, I realized it’s right in Chinatown in Malaysia – and right next to Jalan Petaling, a well known street market. Lots of stuff to see nearby!
I didn’t have a lot of energy, but for dinner I went downstairs to a restaurant owned (I think) by the hostel called Mingle Cafe and got Nasi Ulam Ayam Percik, a chicken dish:
I also got some kombucha, and in total the whole meal cost just under $9 USD! The prices here are a big shock to me – food and lodging are both extremely cheap, with most dishes at restaraunts I’ve seen costing $4-6 USD, and my hostel costing (for a private room!) $22/night. If I had chosen to share a dorm with others, I could have paid only $6-9/night depending on the hostel.
4/21: Today I actually got to explore a little bit! Supper had been so good at Mingle Cafe that I went back for breakfast. This time, knowing how cheap the prices are, I splurged a bit.
This was of course also delicious, and my splurging on two drinks cost me a whopping USD $15.77… I could get used to this!
Next, I began walking to the Perdana Botanical Garden a few km away. As I walked, I realized why many people don’t come to Malaysia during Monsoon season – it was in the upper 80’s outside, and the humidity was high – I was dripping sweat just from walking! However, it was beautiful, and you can tell you’re in a tropical country!
On my way, I walked through a section of Petaling Street, the nearby street market, but apparently only took a few pictures.
Malaysia isn’t known for its architecture that I know of, but I did see a number of cool buildings along the way. There’s a large tower close to my hostel that’s an easy photo subject (you’ll see it a few times throughout this post) and I found a number of other buildings that looked good too.
Once at the botanical gardens, I was ready for something cold and sweet, so I fell prey to the snack stands just waiting for hapless tourists like myself to stumble upon them. I got a durian popsicle (not recommended, durian is an . . . odd flavor) and a lychee drink (I do recommend this one!)
Mildly refreshed, I continued my explorations of the gardens, stopping at some type of war monument.
Something about the silver lotus flowers on the deep blue of the water in the last picture above is really satisfying to me.
After the war monument (whose plaque said it represented the triumph “over the forces of evil” – funny how the forces of good always win), I found my way to the actual botanical garden.
Around this time, the sky (which had sneakily been growing darker and cloudier) began to rain. It was a relatively light rain at first, so I continued to enjoy my walk, shielding my camera from the rain with my hands while I wasn’t using it.
Then, it started to POUR – so like several other people who’d been roaming the park, I scrambled to a large shelter nearby.
Unfortunately, this shelter wasn’t perfect – the wind blew water in from the sides (so you had to stand more inwards) and many of the seams leaked. There were some dry spots, though!
I read my book for a while (Brandon Sanderson’s 5th book in the Stormlight Archives series – great so far, of course!)
Eventually, the rain was joined by lightening and thunder – a proper monsoon storm! It didn’t let up for close to an hour, and most of us just sat around, waiting. At one point, a golf cart with a few covered seats rolled up and took some of the others away (where to? hopefully somewhere dry!) and promised they’d be back for the rest of us – but 20 minutes passed without their return, so eventually, as the rain began to let up, I figured I’d venture out. I was already pretty damp, and the only electronics I had was my camera, so I took its batteries out (electronics getting wet usually won’t hurt them by themselves, if they don’t have any power source when they’re wet – as long as you dry them out completely before restoring power, they’re generally ok!)
Just before I left, one of the women waiting let the kid inside come out, and ran through the proper waterfall and pond now present in the little area with the tree pictured above, while the rest of us laughed as she shouted with joy.
Luckily, the rain finally begin to stop (and not get worse) as I continued to walk. The paving stones were slippery and I almost fell a few times, but I managed to get back in one piece!
On my way home, I ran into an indoor market, with lots of street food, textiles, some antiques, a camera store, and lots of souvenir stores. There was also an art section selling a lot of really cute paintings for quite reasonable prices! I wish I had more space in my bag, but it’s probably a good thing I don’t!
After the market, I went back to the hostel, changed into clean clothes, and wrote the blog posts from yesterday. At the market I also picked up a few snacky items for dinner:
It’s funny – the food here is so cheap, that sometimes the prices in Malaysian Ringgits lines up with what I would expect to pay in USD – except that the Ringgit is worth only about 23 cents! The two meat pasteries, for example, were 4.50 each – a little pricey for USD, but converted to Ringgets, only $1.03 each! The drink was 9.90, pricey for even a specialty boba drink in the US, but not outside of the realm of possibility – but of course, actually only cost $2.26.
I really could get used to this… Maybe I should have spent 2 weeks here instead of in Japan!
The last thing I did was a recruiter interview (at 2:30AM local time!), this time for an actual electrical engineering role in Washington. I’m quite excited about this one – if working at Rivian doesn’t work out, I’m hoping this will. It’s a neat sounding job at a company that seems to have good culture, and should pay pretty competitively. It’s also a hybrid position – so working from home would be common, but not mandatory. The interview went well, so here’s to hoping I get a followup interview!
All for today! You probably won’t hear from me again for a few days, since this evening I fly to Japan. After a day or two to settle in, I should be back on track with more updates.
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