“If you think the spray might bother you,” a voice said over the Airplane speaker, “be sure to cover you eyes, nose and mouth. Also, if you think you might be allergic, cover your mouth and do no breath it in.” Two stewardess’, wearing black stockings, black pencil skirts, high collared red and white shirts and white gardening gloves, walked in unison down each aisle, spraying a constant stream of aerosol disinfectant above their heads. After two passes through the plane, the procession stopped and the voice over the loudspeaker said, “welcome to Kuala Lumpur. We hope you’ve enjoyed your flight”

Entry Two
25 august 2008
Sprawled in linen pants with the window open, trying to figure out what to with my new found jetlag. Last night was fun – but oh so much to take in. Alex picked me up at the airport at around 7pm. My plane was a bit earlier than expected so I won the race to the arrivals area. In my weakened state, I was easy prey for the 47 cab drivers and information services people. I found myself feeling like Stan’s dad in South Park; “I don’t have any change!!” So to escape, I sat down behind a large pillar at a coffee kiosk and grabbed an espresso. Soon, Alex showed up and joined me for a coffee. This was definitely in order – I needed some serious false energy to keep me going for the rest of the night. I was feeling very… crazy. We took the express train to the central station here. Alex explained how in KL there are three public transit companies with three different tracks the never really join up. There’s the commuter train, the monorail, and the LRT. So rather than switch to the monorail, come arriving the Central station, we hoped in a cab. So apparently the cab world here is… well a whole other world. And not the charming whole new world from Alladdin either. Apparently when it comes to people with white people and people with baggage, it becomes more of a pre-negotiated price, usually starting off insanely high. The cab we jumped into, upon hearing our location wanted to charge 25 ringget (so around $8.3 canadian) – alex got him down to 20 ringget, which is apparently pretty dece for a cab out front of the central station. So we headed to 38 Bidara Condiminiums, on Bedara street. To be honest I was super surprised. Very upscale-looking from the lobby. Also, very secure. You need a keycard to get into the building, then again to get in the elevator, then again to pick a floor, then two keys to get into the room.
I exploded my stuff into my new room and Alex showed me the pool and gym. Now I must say, Sandy’s description of the gym had me envisioning a damp broom closest featuring a stairmaster from 1986. That having been said, I was very surprised! A nice wee gym, with several cardio machines, and no shortage of weight machines/weights. So my thoughts here are that Toronto-Andrew hasn’t put in much regular gym time, so Malaysia-Andrew may just try to make up for it. After hanging out at the pool for a bit, we came back to the room and I called home, and Laura at work (“wait a minute – are you calling my cell phone from Malaysia?”), and let everyone know that I was alive and well. After this, Alex took my on a tour of the neighborhood. First, to the “times square” of KL – pretty much the intersection point of 4 (update: its actually 7) malls. There was a guy with two monkeys that were running around and climbing stuff. Apparently he’s there all the time, and just yells stuff to his them. And make no mistake, these are cute monkeys – like Phantom of the Opera symbols monkey. Wow, I suddenly just had a flashback of tearing up as an eight year old at the end of Phantom of the Opera when the stage is quiet except for the sad monkey with its symbols. Weird. Anyways, we made our way to Jalan Alora (?) a street lined with food stalls. Alex pointed out one he recommended and we took a seat at a plastic street table nearby. Basically he did all the ordering and stuff – I was pretty much useless at this point. We got like 4 dishes and a beer each – the food was amazing. So tasty, and incredibly spicy and garlicy. One dish was fried chicken top with spicy mango and onion in a very thai sauce. We also got various fried noodles, beef and Satays with peanut sauce. The bill came to the equivalent of roughly $21 Canadian. Is that not insane? In terms of how my body feels about it, however, well… only time will tell. So after food, Alex showed me around a bit more – we ended up taking up shop in a shisha restaurant. We chilled on red pillows out front of the restaurant with Jasmin tea and a hookah. I broke out my laptop soon and sniped wireless from the restaurant next store. After this, we headed back to the apartment, and I crashed. Jet lag has me in its icy grips, so I got up after only about 6 hours sleep, at 7AM, Malaysia time. And now… the day begins.

Note: I wrote an alternate first blog entry on the plane from Hong Kong to KL. Honestly, it’s just weird. I think the world is better off not reading it. I spend about a page ranting about a season 19 Simpsons episode I watched on the plane – except I couldn’t remember any specific examples of what bugged me about it so I just come across as crazy and like 70.