Malaysia – Kuala Lumpur to Penang

By Rough Guy’d

By Thursday I had decided to try to go to the twin towers again. Though I had seen them previously from the outside, I knew you could go inside and take a tour of the place and even go on the bridge that links the two towers together. To go inside them didn’t cost you any money but you had to get a ticket anyway due to limited numbers being allowed inside. By the time I managed to get to the city centre with my uncle, it was 10am and I was unfortunately too late to get a ticket. I spent the rest of the day visiting a travel expo as I planned for the next part of my trip after Malaysia.

Seeing as it was the school holidays and the Transformers movie had just recently been released, I went out and bought some tickets for me and my young cousins to see the movie for the next night. The movie turned out to be just what I expected and we all thoroughly enjoyed it, both my cousins, the maid and myself. One thing I learned about life in Malaysia is that a maid is not that uncommon. Many well-off families and even quite a few not so well-off have a maid.

They live in the same house as the family with a separate bathroom and bedroom for their use and they look after all the needs of the family, including cooking, cleaning and looking after the children. The cost of this is not prohibitive either and families are just as likely to have a car as they are to have a maid. After the movie, the kids decided on Tony Romas for dinner, a more western-type cuisine with ribs, pasta and burgers filling us up.

By Saturday, I went up north to Penang with my other uncle. He works a gruelling schedule with half his time spent in Kuala Lumpur living and working by himself and the rest of the time spent at home in Penang with his family. My auntie that came with me to the museum also came along and we stopped at Ipoh along the way for a delicious lunch of local Chinese delicacies. Of all my relatives in Malaysia, this family in Penang are the ones I’m most close to. My mum had always had a very strong relation to my uncle and the feeling was reciprocated by both him and his family. As well as this, all three of my cousins here were much closer to my age and I had always felt close to them and we spent a great deal of time catching up.

The next day was spent at the Queensbay shopping mall. Through a chance glance at the newspaper, I discovered there was an exhibition at the mall and other than the agreeable price (free), it was an opportunity to see something of cultural worth, pop culture that is...

It was an exhibition of Transformers through the ages and while not really the type of culture that I came all this way to see, it was still something that I was keen to look at having grown up playing with Transformer toys. It ended up being a lot more interesting than I first expected with lots of nostalgia but also lots of newer items such as the motorbikes from the movie.