Adventures By Design

In which the travelers get sucked in by free wi-fi.

We got into KL in the late afternoon yesterday, so beyond finding dinner and settling into our hotel, we didn’t do or see much. Today we set out to see a little of the city, and decided to do it by walking. Remarkably, for a city of well over a million people it’s really easy to walk around KL and see most of the sights on foot. All the taxi drivers think we’re crazy for walking, but after we tell them ‘no thanks’ to the offer of a ride, they are quite kind and polite; we love the lack of the hard sell.

For all our good intentions of seeing the city, we really only saw a few blocks of Chinatown, where our hotel is. Unfortunately for our sight-seeing plans we got waylaid by a Starbucks with free wi-fi internet, and we settled down with our Eee PC for some serious web-surfing and blog maintenance.

After we finally dragged ourselves away from the interweb we walked around for a while, went to a pet store and started missing our dog, Inca, terribly. We consoled ourselves with a yummy dinner at a Chinese vegetarian restaurant. For any Calgarians (past or present) out there it was much like Buddha’s Veggie with ‘mock’ meat crafted to look and perhaps taste like the real thing. The food was great and the staff was really friendly, so maybe we’ll go back.

After dinner we made a quick trip down Petaling Street, which is a major night market in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown. Unfortunately such markets are getting pretty old: you see the same stuff in them all over Asia, and most of it is cheap junk. Also, we have no room in our bags (or strength in our backs) to carry more stuff around Asia with us. We beat a quick retreat from the vendors trying to sell watches, sneakers, and tourist t-shirts, and went home to bed.