Resting in Kuala Lumpur

Both Lima and Kuala Lumpur have a mystique about them I can only attribute to "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego". (It's too bad I'm still only a gumshoe, and we won't be going to Cairo).

Lima, I'm sorry to say, didn't really live up to it's mystique, but Kuala Lumpur (or KL as the Malaysians call it) does. We think KL is pretty keen.

Normally I'm not one for edifices (at least, of the non-philosophical variety, har har), but the Petronas Twin Towers are really cool. Here are Jen and I standing in front of them!

In the basement of the towers is a sweet shop called La Cucur, which specializes in traditional Malay sweets (about which more later). Here is Jen enjoying a sampler plate:

In general, we liked the food in KL a lot. There was a fantastic Indian restaurant near our hotel where we could get Roti Telur (egg Roti, pictured below) with curry dipping sauce for 1.60 Rm (which is 45 cents), as well as my favorite Teh Tarik ever for an additional 30 cents. In the afternoon, I would go through about 4 or 5 of them as I sat and did my math (which I've been told to spare you the details of, even though I've been working on really cool and interesting problems). A little further on, there was another great Indian place where we could get a delicious Thali for about a dollar.

Almost every day we were there, the evening brought a pretty substantial rain storm, which was also fantastic. Here it is just starting to rain in China Town. You can kind-of make out the fruit seller, and the cauldron of roasting chestnuts.

After a delicious dinner, we returned to find that the street our hotel was on had turned into a river!

Pretty much everyone spoke at least some English, so it was very easy to navigate our way around the city and attend to our business. It was the work of a single day to find the Indonesian embassy and get our 60-day tourist visas, as well as to get a prescription for our anti-malarials and purchase enough to last until the end of our SE Asia leg (plus 30 days). (we had some pills, which we've been taking, but not enough).

That's it! Next we go to Ubud, the arts and cultural center of Bali!