Sweating in Malaysia

So made it back to Kathmandu alright. Caught up with friends, doing some part-time job in an air-conditioned building, getting food-poisoning. You know, the usual. The highlight of those weeks was the daily cycle-commuting routine to work. Through the oldish parts of town from Lainchour through Durbar Square and over the bridge. Dodging pedestrians and ramming the occasional bike. But although I sold my heart to Kathmandu and the lovely people within, I masochistically set out for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to do some telecom hacking with my friend Luke for a bit.

stock picture of the Petronas towers, that I'll replace with my own generic picture of the Petronas towers soonish maybe.

And where Darjeeling was cold, this place is HOT. What possesses a country to decide to build their capital (and yes in this instance they did decide) on the freakn equator? It’s hot and humid. It’s about 34 degrees Celsius right now, and summer-season hasn’t even started. In Europe it’s snowing and below zero because of climate change and here it’s 4 degrees above average because of climate change. Even weirder, since we’re on top of the equator you might simplistically think that there are no real seasons here. But it has these funky east-west monsoon seasons. Where from the months bla through apple the east is in monsoon, and from the months foo to bar the west is monsoony. And as you can conclude, they don’t overlap, so there’s always a spot where it’s nice. Apparently this made it a nice spot for sea-trade, where traders waited and played canasta or Wii or something on one side of the country to wait for the monsoon that stretched towards the other side to cease so the route would open up again. This is from hear-say though. This info might be totally false. Didn’t want to check the facts in case they might be false. I did check up on the seasonal intecracies and it’s all a bit more complicated, but who cares really?

tigers in the shop

As for me, I set up quarter at this cool hostel in the heart of (KL) Kuala Lumpur, called the Equator hostel for reasons to me unknown. Kuala Lumpur isn’t really a place you want to be for too long, but the airport is kinda a hub for all these cheap AirAsia flights, so loads of backpackers spend here a night or two, before moving on to palmier pastures. With about two weeks under my belt, I’m concidered a veteran. And treated as such. I am hurled across the place like bagage, sleeping then in this room, then in that, for rather dodgy, some might say seedy, reasons. The place is doing rather well and it’s kinda cool seeing these backpackers stream by, in a lazy kind of hurry to fancy palmy islands with clear-blue seas, leaving me behind, with a hunger for adventure gnawing in my belly. But I wave them out every time, pretending to be happy. Friends for a second. Sniff..

Yea well, should I divulge some more bladibla cultural BS? Yes? Good! Well so as you know it’s Chinese New Year atm, and since there’s around 30 percent Chinese over here it’s New Year forever it seems. They don’t walk the streets in drunken joy though. They like to celebrate in shopping malls. The center of their social lives. Or in their homes I guess. But in the shopping malls they hire some dudes to do the dragon in front of their shops, and that’s the only celebration that goes down it seems. In China they are prone to celebrate.. No sorry, this is just too boring. I’ll save this stuff for a boring post. And you know what, I won’t make this post very rediculously long for a change.