Rants and raves of Kuala Lumpur

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Right, where was I? This catch up game is exhausting.
The charming Hostel Cosmopolitan in Kuala Lumpur. I shouldn’t be so hard on it. The rates were good, the owner a very sweet man and it even had a full kitchen at our disposal. It was maybe just the steps that you have to take to get into the safe bubble of the hostel. Essentially, we were living in possibly the dodgiest building in more or less the slums of KL. I don’t want to bash the neighborhood, it was full of markets and kind people, but I will bash the architect and/or construction team who erected our multi-level building complex, of which only our floor had tenants brave enough to take a chance on it.

Unless you count the mysterious pool house in the basement that wouldn’t have me stepping in for a game if my life depended on it. It’s a given that the elevator was busted–if it had ever even been functional–so our walks up the stairs involved squeezing through blockades of grimy, infested “smoking couches” and often tiptoeing by “visitors” conked out on the hard concrete floor. We are not unfamiliar with the abusive usage of drugs, especially meth, around these parts, so we were not surprised to find our shady little ghetto bustling around the clock, and sleeping at strange hours. Anyways, it had us on the buddy system.

But the people in the market were awesome. We decided we’d make use of our kitchen and cook ourselves some Balinese-style Tempeh (success!), but quickly got drawn into other enticing artifacts the locals call food. Any time we wanted to buy a funky looking fruit to try, it seemed to absolutely bewilder the vendors. As in, why on earth would you buy just one? I guess things are sold in kilos for the mass-production approach (everyone and their mother has a food business here). Our request always gave them a good laugh and almost without fail they ended up just giving it to us for free.