Olympus OM1. f1.8 Kodak 160NC

I’ve mentioned before how much I adore the rules governing how much weight normal passengers are allowed to take on planes. When I turned up at the airport, pretty done in after my journey to the airport from leaving Eri, I was pretty sure that my bags were going to be a little over the limit…not surprising when leaving after six years. In the end, they weighed about 40kgs, 20kgs over the limit. The nice lady at the check-in told me that it would cost 50,000円, just from Tokyo to Kuala Lumpur. I would presumably be charged again in KL for the next day’s flight to London. So it was that I ended up checking in wearing a pair of shorts, 3 pairs of jeans, 4 t-shirts, 2 sweaters, a hoody and my winter jacket, with an external hard-disk in each of 3 pockets and a polaroid camera in the last. It was 36 degrees. The woman at the security checked cocked an eyebrow when she saw me having to pull down 2 pairs of jeans to get at my passport. She asked why I was wearing so many clothes. I informed her that I had been told that Malaysia was very cold at this time of year. She laughed and went to get one of her co-workers to tell him about the stupid foreign bloke who thought that the equator was cold. I swear, if you were a terrorist, you could do worse than to masquerade as a stupid, overheated, foreign bloke, dedicated to making a tit out of himself.

It turns out that Malaysia is hot. Had I been wearing my Frosty the Snowman costume, I would have died in minutes. I liked the ethnic mix in KL. It was nice to be in an asian country which has so many different asian communities. After arriving and checking into my hotel, I headed straight for the Petronas Towers, which were impressive, but the skybridge between them got booked up in minutes that morning, so I couldn’t get up to visit it. They should take a leaf out of Tocho/Ropppongi Hills’ book and just let everyone in.

The next day, I got up really early and walked around Chinatown, the KL covered market and then up and past the mental Kuala Lumpur station to the Islamic Art Centre. I got lost, and ended walking up the massive hill behind the mosque, past Stonehenge and the lotus garden, towards the bird park. After thinking that the weather was pretty tame for after Tokyo, it turned 11 and suddenly got hot. Very, very hot. And humid. And hot. And then a little bit hotter. I started thinking that I might actually end up dead in a corner of a lotus garden so turned round, staggered down the hill and went to the Islamic Art Centre. It was fascinating. Lovely exhibits, especially the ones on mosque design around the world and on Islamic calligraphy. There was almost no one there, a real shame. After being refused entry to the Friday Prayers at the local mosque (no amount of Salaam Alaykum-ing would convince them that I was a Muslim), and then visiting the Dubai-baiting shopping mall at the bottom of the again-over-booked Petronas Towers, I went back to the airport for the flight home. I liked KL, but I wouldn’t want to live there…too bloody hot.

The following is another 360 Quicktime VR Panorama. Click anywhere in the picture and drag to spin round and see the weird Malaysian architectural hodgepodge: