No. 43

Visiting The Near Future: Arriving at Kuala Lumpur's slick little airport after a month in India was like jumping slightly forward in time. Maybe 2010. We fell quickly in love with the modernity of Malaysia's capital, WiFi, monorails, future fashion and a large gay culture abounds. Especially at our hostel.

Amy: I really love this place.

Sloan: The air conditioning makes me happy.

Amy: I'm talking about how all the employees are gay boys who walk around in their underpants and read Cosmo.

Sloan: Should we stay an extra week?

Amy: They're dancing to Girls Just Wanna Have Fun while they clean the bathroom!

We took five days in KL to decompress from India. The city is a wonderful fusion of Asian cultures, a huge pork-and-rice Chinese influence mingling easily with the tradionally conservative (and very Islamic) chicken-and-rice Malay society. So we ate, we shopped, we ate, we shopped, we passed out in the AC (it's 88 degrees with outrageous humidity every day), then we ate more and talked about shopping. There aren't many unique sightseeing experiences you can have while visiting a modern city, so the attraction becomes the fact that you're having familiar experiences in a crazy futuristic Asian version of a metropolis. So we walked around Chinatown (scored a knock-off watch, it's still working), Little India (cleaner, quieter version of the real thing), and we took a trip up the tallest twin towers in the world, the Petronas Towers. Nice views, lots of hokey educational displays about architecture, and a thicket of shopping and dining on the ground floor. Hooray for the First World.