This morning we had a nice plan of the day, which got quickly changed by rain and shopping, but none the less it was a success. We woke up to Traditional Thai massages we booked at a fancy salon in the Golden Triangle, the area where TGI Fridays was. As I found in China, Asian massages are like nothing you would get in the US or in the west on general. Thai was very similar. We were given jasmine tee while they got our room ready. All 3 of us girls went in for Traditional massages. First, the ladies gave us sandals and washed our feet. We all were in the same room with curtains around us, but they just closed them to the outside and not towards each other. We changed into a large shirt and pants and lied down on our backs on a mattress on the floor. The massages were rougher and involved pressure points and pushing rather than rubbing. They would also stretch and twist our body parts and sit on us to apply pressure. I enjoyed it, the other girls (this was their first massage) did not. The ladies did a very good job and the spa was nice, a very enjoyable experience.
We left for a lunch and headed to the other main city-like part of town, this is the part of the city where communities are rather than large buildings and shopping. This is where Chinatown, Little India, famous mosques, etc are. I noticed something on the way in; there are some words in Malay that are spelled like English phonetics. For example, taksi is taxi, muziem is museum, etc. Anyway, we started at the Central Market. We ended up staying here for a lot longer than expected because it was more like a craft market than a tourist facility, lots of locals and tourists were here. The Chinese ran stands were closed, still for CNY. There were trinket shops, clothing, textiles, hand carved wood, silver, antiques, everything. The first shop I enjoyed was this beautiful pottery-like store ran by an Iranian (it was also Iranian goods). Him and I talked about Southeast Asia, where to go and which beaches were the best. He was curious to ask me questions, as an American in Singapore, what it was like to go from a not-so-much-rules country to a strict country like Singapore, as, how he put it, he enjoyed going from rules-Iran to no-rules-Malaysia but missed the order sometimes. I asked him to tell me about his pottery, since I obviously couldn't afford the 150$ USD+ goods, I just wanted to know about it and he told me about it. It was actually copper, which amazed me because it looked like ceramics until you picked it up. It was painted white in the background, then with hand painted blue designs. It was scratch proof, fire proof, and shatter proof. He also pulled out a box made out of camel bone, which smelled like camel butt. I bought a barrette, which is inlaid wood with enamel and camel bone.
The next place I went to wasn't such a positive experience. It was a stall with brass inlaid wood and I found a tray I liked. I was talking to the guy for a while, he was Pakistani. I was trying to barter and I told him I was from the US. He started off with I don't mean to offend you, a bad sign right there, and went into this speech about how he believed most Pakistani's felt about the US as we left their country in shambles after helping them and this and that and we only help out countries of natural disasters to get our image up the world. But please, I don't mean to offend you. I just said I don't want the tray and I left.
I ended up buying a Turkish rug, a tad bigger than a welcome mat for 10$ USD and I also found an antique rummage-through kind of shop with clearance dishes. I bartered down to about $15 USD for a set of three large green Japanese bowls with a gold leaf pattern. Very pretty, and they're antiques :) Some thing we had also planned on trying, we found in the market, the massage fish! "Hello my name is doctor fish and i do not have teeth" read the sign of the cute fish spa in the market. A while ago in Turkey, some people discovered these fish that like to nibble off dead skin. There are many spas in few countries that have pools of these fish you can submerge your whole body in for exfoliation and micro-circulation. KL is famous for these little pools of fish that you stick your feet in. for about 2$USD, we all got to spend 10 min sticking our feet in a tank of well over 400 fish. I am not ticklish in my feet, but we all were screaming with laughter trying to get our feet in. Slowly but surely, we managed to get into our ankle. The fish would like suck, it was very odd and creepy. But our feet really did feel smoother after we did it!
It started raining, of course as soon as we left from the cover of the market, and we took refuge in the outskirts of Little India in a very local Nepalese restaurant, where we all got hard stares as the foreigners entered the locals-only place. Luckily, many of the waiters spoke Hindu, which Chin May speaks, and he ordered us some good snacks and helped with the waiter tried to double our bill price.
The rain had subsided so we went to Independence Square, a large field (think soccer field) where the Japanese Red Army officially surrendered to the people of Malaysia (there was no official government before this, just a king) after they surrendered to the world (Thanks, America). Anyway, it is in front of the beautifully large Government center for Info, Communication and something else. There is also one of the worlds largest flag poles on the square. We hung around Little India and Chinatown, which was full of pirated DVD's and purses. Finally, after eating at a nice local meal which I bartered because I only had 55 RM (Malaysia Ringgits) left for the next 24 hours, we got on to the bus.
The bus system here is very different than any bus system I've been on. (which is pretty much just Singapore haha). You get on the bus and they do not leave until the bus is somewhat full or, in the case of this night, we sat there for 20 minutes and nobody else wanted to get on. Then, someone goes around with little tickets and you give them money and they give you a ticket. There's no official exchange of where you are going or how much it costs to get there, its like an honor system or something. We decided not to go into the KL Patronas Towers after talking with a UK guy from the hostel. In the past year, the towers decided to charge a 3RM fee for coming to get a ticket, which tells you what time that day you can join your tour group. You can only go up to the bridge part of the towers (1/2 way up) and they are offices, so there is really nothing else to see. They told us that most of the time, you can get a ticket before 11am, but because it is CNY, they went at like 7am and the tickets had already been sold out! Office building aren't that worth it, and the bridge was at the height of the SkyBar we had went to the night before, so we know what that view looks like. You really can't get an idea of exactly how tall these buildings are until we were at the bar (the towers have 81 floors) and theres nothing NEAR as tall. And, with an exception of the jungle, EVERY place we went this weekend you could see the towers, EVERYWHERE. Awesome.
The architecture in this area, and many of the government buildings around, are Muslim influence. I mean this by the dome-point-like add-ons to the top of buildings and round/pointed doorways of the top of a mosque instead of traditional square doors in the west. There are many signs written in Malay, English, and Arabic. Many of the jalans (roads) are names after Muslim people as well.
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