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:

The Dashanzi Art District (know as 798 after the name of the factory that sits in its centre), is an area of Chaoyang in the north east of the city. It used to be an area of factories and military buildings, but now the whole area has been turned into art galleries and cafes. It’s a little bit like areas in New York or London, but totally art related. There is graffiti all over the walls of the buildings. Plants and weeds push up through the cracks in the pavements. Old industrial cogs lie around the streets and huge pipes, now rusty, form a web above.

We wandered round for a while, taking photos of everything, people, walls, graffiti, statues, buildings, trees, and then found a cafe. Thinking it was about 11, we had a nice coffee and cheesecake and then realised it was actually 1.30. Strange lunch. After, we walked round some more. Stairways lead to strange design offices and tiny galleries. Fasionista girls sat looking bored waiting for customers. We found a bright shop where Eri bought some notepads. We saw a massive fist in the ground, the size of a car.

The biggest gallery is the 798 Space, in the old factory that gives the area its name. The building is pretty stunning – clearly designed practically, it is nonetheless pretty aesthetically amazing. Old Maoist slogans are still painted in massive characters on the walls. Glass windows in the floor show old industrial equipment. Old drills and lathes still stand around the space, like exhibits. The only exhibition on when we were there was some artist’s (whose name, I annoyingly can’t remember) stamps. They were politically pretty radical, mainly about the Chinese population living on their knees, depicting scenes like migrant workers forced to sell pirate DVDs on the streets of the capital to feed their children. The were really interesting, but you couldn’t help notice the irony of the largest gallery in the whole area being used only to display a few sheets of stamps.

We left the area to go back to the centre of the city and try to find the Pyongyang Store. According to Lonely Planet, it was a store in the centre where you could buy stuff (t-shirts and the like), fresh from the Axis of Evil. Unfortunately, it had only been an exhibition and was long since finished. It’s annoying when guide books make mistakes like this, confusing an exhibition for a store seems like a relatively easy distinction, but whatever. Back to our hotel’s area to try out a restaurant for lunch (about 4.30pm) that we had seen the day before.

Not having a clue what we were ordering, we got far too much, and I was a little worried by what the Cow Balls was. Quite tasty though. Salty. Next Eri went for a massage and I went to buy myself some new sneakers! Yeah! It seems recently that wherever I go in Asia I can find sneakers in my size, just not in midget Japanland. Oh well. Got a nice pair of new Dunk for a little cheaper than they would have been in Japan (if they even had my size).

Evening and we went off to Nanluogu Xiang, a really cool little hutong street near our hotel and had a lovely coffee in a nice cafe that Eri’s guide book recommended. A very nice family run place that did an excellent apple pie. Wandering down the alleyway, with little shops and bars, beautiful wooden lattice work in the windows and walls, the light from the shops is the only thing lighting the street outside. The end of the trip, back to the hotel to pack up and get to bed for our 4.30am start. Must come back to Beijing soon…

This isn’t because the students don’t know any other answers. If you grill them and stress that you want their true feelings, they will answer with a myriad of original (odd and occasionally perplexing) reponses: “I am beauty”, or “I’m glad to be here tonight”, or “Yes, I am”, or even “I am happiness”. I meet all with expressions of praise: “Well done”, “Good, beauty itself withers in your presence, Taro”, and “I’m glad you’re here too”, and so on. However, the next class when we do greetings, “I’m fine thank you, and you?”. Pointless.

I was talking to one of my students yesterday. She had gone to America over the Christmas holidays with her family and was telling me about it. She got ill at some point during the trip, and they took her to the local hospital. As she was the only English speaker, her family made her talk to the doctor. She said she wasn’t worried about it, as she wasn’t that ill and we had recently done getting ill role-plays in class. Apparently, she was all ready to tell the doctor that “her belly ached”. When the doctor came into the room though, she greeted the student’s family and then turned to the girl and said, “So, how are you?”. She, of course, replied, “I’m fine thank you, and you?”. The doctor said, “If you are fine, why are you in the hospital?”, (which I have to admit sounds little bit harsh). The girl got confused and nervously, started spouting Japanese until the hospital got an interpreter. I asked the girl to explain this to the class, as an example of why the students should always think about their responses to these simple questions. The kids were mesmerized by her story, with lots of “oooo”s and “ahhh, naruhoudo”s. I was happy that they could finally understand what we had been telling them for so long.

I went into the class today and started the lesson. “Good morning class, how are you?”. The class, depleted by the current school infection and lead by the girl I had talked to, replied as one: “Fine thank you, and you?”.