trip to Kuala Lumpur and Beijing - the KL leg

I didn't really achieve much during the Kuala Lumpur leg of my trip. I just wanted to go back to Malaysia to visit some relatives (mostly cousins), chill-out and just eat the local food. I didn't do any real sight-seeing; it wasn't my objective, although there are a lot of nice touristy places to visit on the peninsula side of Malaysia. I hail from the island side (the east side) from Sabah (north Borneo region), so even the peninsula side is all 'new' to me.

The one thing I do like about KL is that almost everyone speaks English. I even heard a couple of Chinese people speaking English like Chinese was going out of fashion. I guess I'm just too 'jungle-boy', as one friend put it, since I come from a much more rural and backwards area of Malaysia.

Food was certainly the highlight of my holiday in KL. I mean I didn't stuff myself crazy. I still had 3 standard meals a day. So it's not like I got to eat everything I wanted to eat. But at least I did get to eat a lot of my favourite foods. As you can see from the attached picture, I'm chowing down some fine char kuay teow. There's also a nice cold beverage of Iced Kopi-O. I also had the pleasure of eating a number of other local foods such as steam boat, bak kut teh, nasi lemak, curry laksa and beef noodle soup. Incidentally, I had KFC as well. No I'm not crazy. KFC is so much nicer in Asian countries, and Malaysia is no exception. I recommend anyone visiting Malaysia to actually try KFC - especially the Hot & Spicy variety.

Meeting up with my cousins was a major objective of my holiday. I haven't seen some of them in half a decade. It was certainly nice to catch up with some of them over a nice steam boat dinner. I actually intended to treat them to a western-style dinner at a Steak house. However, my elder cousin (who is at least 15 years my senior) objected to me paying for dinner, and insisted on having steam boat. It was for the best; the steam boat was simply fantastic.

I did manage to treat one of my younger cousins to a Steak dinner. His name is Patrick, and I would say we are probably the closest out of all my cousins. I figured that just eating local food would probably be an anti-climax to him. Obviously it's a treat for me to have local food; but he (and the rest of them) eat local food all the time. I invited him and his girlfriend to a meal at The Ship. They serve a reasonable steak, but the cut of meat isn't as good as what you get here in Australia. I also tried the ox tail soup on a recommendation from a friend.

Another thing I really enjoyed was the local fruit juices. I haven't had a decent star fruit juice in a long time, so I had to have one. The star fruit juice was simply heavenly. I also had honey dew juice as well.

I filled my time away from my cousins with shopping and some limited sight-seeing. I went to KLCC shopping centre - probably the most upmarket shopping centre you can go to in KL - and basically window-shopped. I wasn't really interested in buying anything; although a friend of mine tasked me to find a Canon 580EX II professional flash for his DSLR camera. I did score myself a couple of t-shirts and some Lot100 lollies that my mum likes.

Here's a link to my photo album of my trip:

trip to Kuala Lumpur and Beijing - the KL leg