Day 31... I've been here so long that counting is getting difficult

Sorry it has taken me so long to post, I've been fairly busy this week considering that I am in school (and I finally have a finished copy of my resume, hurray!).

So completely disregard the hearsay in my previous post that Kuala Lumpur is nothing special. My experience in KL was amazing. Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, it was the perfect weekend to go because it coincided with the annual Thaipusam festival, which takes place at the Batu Caves right outside of Malaysia (the Batu Caves constitute one of the biggest Hindu shrines outside of India).

We left NUS early Friday morning. It took us about two hours to get across Singapore and through both the Singaporean and Malaysian border checkpoints. We then took a bus to KL (about a 5-6 hour journey).

As you can see, the bus was extremely comfortable.

Friday evening/afternoon was spent walking around KL (mostly everything we wanted to see wound up being around a 25 min walk from the hostel).

We went up through the city jungle to the KL tower and found a pack of monkeys.

Trash Monkey

We went to the central market where we decided to try out a fish spa. The spas have tanks of fish that feed/live off of dead skin and you put your feet and hands into the tanks. I would advise against the foot tank if you are ticklish.

I was a big baby and it took me basically the whole amount of time to put my feet all the way in

This Australian boy was far braver than I

After the Central Market, we took advantage of the fact that Elliott from UConn half grew up in Hong Kong (half in Connecticut) and can speak Cantonese and Mandarin (Ben from UNC who is sitting next to me in the above picture spent a few years growing up in China and has since studied Mandarin -- as far as I can tell he is really good at it) -- we went to a roadside place owned and operated by a man who only spoke Cantonese who made us the most amazing meal. His specialty was cooking/boiling/frying? meat in a tea type mixture -- we tried the pork, fish, and chicken -- all delicious. After dinner we walked through Chinatown to see what knockoffs we could find. After about an hour long debate at a sunglass hut we got a good deal on some fake sunglasses. Look for the sunglasses in the group pictures further down.

Saturday was the Thaipusam festival which takes place on the full moon of every January and the largest festival happens in Kuala Lumpur. We had to get up at 7 in order to make a 1.5 hour journey (by monorail and train) to the Batu Caves. The caves are only at the end part of the festival -- by the time they got to the caves, the participants had already walked for several hours (from the city). So, I don't know enough about the festival to feel confident in my ability to tell you about it, but basically the general purpose of the festival is to celebrate the birth of the god Murugun -- people who participate do so because they want to "avert a great calamity" (thank you, Wikipedia) and they make a vow to take a kavadi (some kind of physical burden) up inside the caves. The kavadis vary -- the most common one was a pot full of milk which men and women carried on their heads. Some of the men carried large canopies up to the temple instead -- some of them had pierced their skin (many people had bells or fruit hooked to their backs) and some had rods through their mouths which prevented them from speaking.

This man has bells hooked into his back

Some of the chains hanging down (if not all) are hooked into this mans body

Those quills are sticking out of his body

The burdens that these men carried were unreal, and these three men did not even have the most painful looking kavadis that we saw on Saturday.

This is a picture of all of us in front of the stairs leading up to the caves. We waited in line to get up to the caves for well over an hour -- It was so hot outside that sweat was pouring off of my legs and splashing on the ground (I don't even know if I have sweated this much in Bikram Yoga before).

Over a million people were at the caves on Saturday (forget about personal space). We literally got pushed up the stairs because the crowd was so big, it was a little bit scary (but not as scary as coming back down the stairs).

When we finally got up into the caves we realized that there would be more waiting involved


A slightly creepy picture of me inside the caves

Everyone -- looking up at a white man who had climbed some scaffolding in order to take a picture

View from the top

On Sunday morning, we woke up early again (third day in a row, struggle) in order to get tickets to walk on the sky bridge in between the Petronas Towers (in the informational video before we went up it was pronounced petRO-nass and Malaysia was pronounced Muh-Lay-See-UH).

3-D informational movie before we got to go up, it was basically about Petronas and oil

All of us on the sky bridge

Towers from outside


Then we started to get creative...


Kerry taking a picture of John (traveler from the UK who was staying in our hostel) with the towers


The UConn kids decided it was necessary to do "U-S-A"


This is some of us in front of the hostel we stayed at (with our fake sunglasses on)

So before we caught the bus later in the afternoon five of us (in the above picture) decided to check out early and go see the National Mosque. We had to take the monorail and walk a large amount - it was quite a trek to get there.

National Mosque

And then this happened...

Apparently there are only certain hours for Non-Muslim tourists to visit the mosque and we missed them, maybe next time


At least we had the opportunity to take one more group picture with our new sunglasses

Anyway, no big plans for this weekend -- so far tomorrow night the Singaporeans who did their exchange at UNC are taking us out to dinner in Chinatown, so I'll report back after that.