Kuala Lumpur visit

The best thing about living in Singapore is being able to just pop over to any other Asian country for a few days. A few months back when my brother told me he would be stopping in Kuala Lumpur on his way back to Australia after a 3 week trip around Asia, we decided we would meet him there for a few days, because it is only 45 minutes away by plane and we managed to score $10 flights with Jetstar. We weren't too keen about heading to KL again because we have been there 3 times already when we travelled around Asia in 2010, but each time we have been there was for 1-2 day stopovers before heading onto another destination, so this was the first time KL was the destination and seeing as we are no longer poor backpackers anymore and we are now poor people with an income, we thought we could be a bit more touristy, stay in a better hotel and do more touristy things we never did on the other trips because we were trying to be frugal. Each time we have been we have stayed in cheap hotels, but this time we decided to stay a mid range hotel, the Swiss Inn, which had a pretty decent sized room, but not the best shower, but it did include buffet breakfast which was average to say the least, however for the price it was worth it.

Before we left we exchanged our Singapore dollars to Malaysian Ringgits at the airport and Sean accidentally worked out the exchange rate wrong, so for the whole trip we thought everything was so cheap and didn't realise until the end that we were actually paying almost double what we thought on most things! Oh well, it was nice to believe everything was ridiculously cheap for a while and it is definitely cheaper than Singapore anyway.

The first night we met up with my brother, Steve and his three mates he was travelling with at the Reggae Bar, which is located in Chinatown just down the road from where we were staying and is a very popular backpacker bar. After a few drinks we decided to head to Times Square mall for some shopping and because it has a theme park inside it. I was pretty excited about the theme park because I am a bit of a child when it comes to those kinds of things and my brother acts like a 2 year old pretty much all the time (he is a handful!). While Steve's friends went shopping, Sean, Steve and I went to the theme park. It was only RM38 (SGD15) and there were some pretty good rides for an indoor theme park including the awesome roller coaster. We spent about an hour and half going on all the rides and the only negative about the park was that they waited 10 minutes between each ride to start it probably because there weren't enough people there to fill up each ride. Here are a few photos, but the quality is not the best being they are from my iphone. We did buy a brand new camera duty free but it needed charging before we could use it.

The awesome roller coaster (it had 2 loops!) 

That's my brother 26 going on 2

Guess who's idea this was? haha

Still not got our complete theme park fix, we decided to head to Sunway lagoon located about 20 minutes out of Kuala Lumpur the next day. This theme park has 5 parks in one. Sean and I caught the train directly there from Pasar Seni (Chinatown) to Kelana Jaya and then caught the U623 connecting bus to the Sunway Pyramid. At Sunway pyramid, not only is there the massive theme park, there is also a massive shopping mall and a massive resort. I must say that all the shopping malls we went to in KL were ten times better and bigger than any mall in Singapore and Singapore has some pretty good malls. We met my brother and his friends there and headed into the theme park. Seeing as we worked out the exchange rate wrong we thought it only cost SGD25 to get into all 5 parks but later realised it was actually SGD40 and probably wouldn't have gone if we knew it was this much. Sunway Lagoon was a huge disappointment for us but it may have just been because we coincidentally went on a day that the main attraction, the surf beach, was closed for a function. Saying that, we did find that after paying the entrance fee, we had to pay extra for many things once inside, including lockers, some of the attractions and as we weren't even allowed to bring your own bottle of water in, we were forced to buy it inside. None of the rides were near as good as the indoor theme park at Times Square and half of them were either closed for maintenance or closed for lunch time. This is one thing that annoys me greatly about Asia is how every thing stops for lunch here. Most business will be closed at lunch time here and that can be anytime from 11:30-2pm, so you really have to plan your day around these times. Needless to say, we only stayed at the theme park for about 2 hours before leaving because we were pretty angry most attractions were closed.

We were soon cheered though, because we headed to Bubba Gump's for lunch, which I had never heard of before but Steve had been to it in America and loved it. It is a restaurant based on the movie Forrest Gump and they specialise in shrimp (prawns to us Aussies). They have locations around the world, mainly in America, but some in Asia, including KL, Bali, Hong Kong and Japan. I ordered the Bubba Gump Sampler platter and we stuffed our faces with deep fried shrimp and some other Southern fare and it was all beautiful! I would definitely return for another feed :)

During our lunch a thunder storm was brewing and we ended up catching a taxi back in one of the worst storms I have seen while living in Asia (and there have been some bad ones!) When we got back to Chinatown the rain had cleared and Sean and I did a bit more shopping and this was when we discovered we had the exchange rate all wrong and the cheap bubble burst. That night we decided beers and food on the street were a better idea than the slightly more expensive Reggae Bar and also since we arrived in KL I was yet to have some local food. I mean we can get local food whenever we want in Singapore but I hate going to a different country and only eating western fare. So we sat on some plastic chairs in the middle of Chinatown, people watched and ordered some Spring rolls (the best spring rolls I have ever had have always been in KL), dumplings and a massive portion of pork noodle soup which was amazing and cheap.
We called it an early night and we bid farewell to Steve who was heading back to Aus the next day and we were heading back to Singapore.

It was so great to get out of Singapore for a few days on a little mini break and of course to see my brother. We plan to do a lot more little mini breaks in the next coming months. Unfortunately on this trip I didn't take many pictures because our new camera was charging but I promise to start taking more pictures and post them on here. Here is one last picture, they seem to be giving away free Sean's, lucky I already have one....