18th March 2010
Ok, so maybe I was a little premature when I said yesterday that our room seemed clean. We pulled back the sheets on the bed to go to sleep last night and there was an unidentified ugly stain on them. Of course, since it was now 11.30pm, when I rang down to reception to complain I was told housekeeping was shut and they would change them in the morning. When I asked what we were supposed to do in the meantime, the only suggestion they had was to change rooms. So, yesterday we checked into 608 but last night we slept in room 908 two floors above.
However, after spending half an hour in the 908, we discovered 2 things, firstly it stank of cigarette smoke and secondly the air conditioning was really rattly and noisy. Since by now it was well gone midnight we decided to go to bed and sort it out in the morning.
So, this morning I went down to ask for our old room back with new sheets only to find someone had already been booked into it. Talk about moving fast! Anyway, I complained about the smell, but unfortunately the hotel doesn’t really have any non smoking rooms and due to the central air-conditioning it only takes one person on a floor to be smoking in their room for the rest of the rooms to smell smoky too. We tried and failed to find another hotel while we were waiting for another room here to become available which it finally did about 11.30am.
Room 808 this time, between our two former rooms! They had obviously been hard at it with the air freshener and to be fair to the ladies on reception, they have done their best to help, so we took it. After an hour though, we could again smell smoke, although not as strong as before. To solve the problem, we bought some incense sticks while we were out and about so we can light those in the room - after all incense is in plentiful supply here.
All this to-ing and fro-ing took us well past lunchtime, so we were fairly late heading out to the Petronas Towers. When we arrived, all the free tickets to visit the skybridge on the 41st floor were gone. However, we were able to get a good look at these impressive structures from the outside. As well as a good look at the Maclaren F1 car in the lobby, probably for the promotion of the Malaysian Grand Prix which happens at the beginning of April.
The Petronas Twin Towers were the world’s tallest buildings from 1998 to 2004, when their height was surpassed by Taipei 101. The towers remain the tallest twin buildings in the world. The 88-floor towers are constructed largely of reinforced concrete, with a steel and glass facade designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art, a reflection of Malaysia’s Muslim religion.
We sat and ate lunch in the shadow of these twin giants before heading to Kuala Lumpur City Centre. Spanning 17 acres below the building this park features jogging and walking paths, a fountain with incorporated light show, wading pools, and a children’s playground, along with fabulous views of the towers.
Since we had failed to get inside this icon of KL, we headed off to another, the KL Tower. This is the fourth tallest telecommunications tower in the world and stands majestically on top of Bukit Nanas. At 421 meters and 94 meters above sea level it is considered a main feature of the city skyline.
Unfortunately we were incredibly disappointed on arriving at the tower. It was the biggest tourist trap imaginable with stalls selling cheap tourist tat everywhere. Then when we looked at the prices for going up the tower we discovered they only did a package price for entrance to the tower, the Animal Park, and a Formula 1 experience. We definately didn’t want to pay for these things that we weren’t interested in so we enquired about afternoon tea, which you can enjoy in the revolving restaurant. The woman at the restaurant desk was really unhelpful, saying it was just a drink and a cake, that’s all. It definately didn’t make us want to spend our money there, so we left.
This evening was spent taking another wander around the Chinatown markets, where we got to practice our haggling again - you’ll be glad to know we’re getting better at it and Ed ended up with a couple of Billabong t-shirts for the princely sum of £7 :D.