Malaysia – Kuala Lumpur City Centre

By Rough Guy’d

My first day in Kuala Lumpur by myself as my young cousins went to school and my uncle went to work so I took a ride with my uncle to the city centre and explored the KLCC. One thing that I noticed about the centre was the amount of dripping opulence that could be found here. While I look back fondly on my time in Malaysia with its tasty local food where a full meal costs less than a coffee at Starbucks, the area around KLCC was definitely not that.

Almost every large and over-priced brand from Dolce and Gabbana to Armani, this was not the type of place to be shopping for a young poor backpacker. On top of that, I was not particularly interested in buying things so it didn’t take me long to leave the area and go to the Chinatown area.

The Chinatown area I found much more interesting with interesting little stalls selling all manner of things and much more sights to see. I spent my time visiting the various mosques around the area and seeing some of the more famous landmarks such as Merdaka square.

The following day I decided to take it a bit more easier as following a thirteen hour walk in the hot tropical sun for most of it, I was a bit tired. As it was, I just took the time to walk to one of my auntie’s home who lived nearby.

On Wednesday, one of my aunties decided to join me and we went together to the Muzium Negara, or the national museum of Malaysia. While the museum was interesting, the thing I noticed the most was the distinct lean that the museum took on their history. This was something that I had picked up in Melaka as well and while I’m no historian, I could tell through their exhibits an underlying tone of racism or prejudice that extols the virtues of the native Malay to the exclusion of all others including Chinese and Indians and almost makes it seem like they are an unwelcome inclusion in this otherwise happy little slice of paradise.

This was not blatant in your face type of racism but from stories that I had heard from my own parents and their reasons for leaving Malaysian in the first place, I could tell what I was seeing. This is not to say that Malaysia is a terribly racist country or that it isn’t worth visiting, far from it, but this was something that I picked up. Going throughout Malaysia, I never had the sense of being an outsider (other than being a foreign tourist), with most of the prejudice aimed at their own people and mainly centred around their political freedom.

Coming back home early that day, we had hoped to go to the local night market. One thing I learned in Kuala Lumpur was that night markets were a nightly thing and massive but they moved around every night, with a big one in each area the same day every week.

This meant that if you lived nearby, you’d be able to plan to visit the local night market easily and if you lived really close to it and wanted to go out, then you’d be out of luck thanks to the heavy traffic. Unfortunately a heavy thunderstorm put paid to our plans and we ended up staying in instead.