We're Not In Kansas (or Pittsburgh) Anymore...

Me in front of the Petronas Towers, after work

It's Sunday afternoon, just over a week since I got here.  This is the first time I'm sitting down in an actual restaurant (been all hotel, room service, and food court - and not the cool kind).  A food post to follow, but as my coworkers are either home for the weekend (India, Singapore) or busy and it's just me, time for an update!

Below are a bunch of comments and observations about the last week, in no particular order.  

- It's taken me a week to figure out how to get across the street.  Slight hyperbole, but not much!!  I think I mentioned that my hotel is across the street from one of the big local malls.  Except you can't cross the 5-lane street - I figured out you need to walk to the corner, around the water fountain, cross the little street, up the stairs and escalator to the walkway, and cross that way.  And to go around the block, you have to do the above and then go through the mall.  Super intimidating until you figure it out. And so inefficient, alas. So today's huge achievement is... I figured out how to cross the street!!

Rough route (about half of it) from hotel to walkway; the walkway
in front is exclusively for a different hotel and we can't use it (I checked!)

- Yesterday  I took a jaunt to figure out how to walk from the hotel to work. I of course had it all figured out on Google maps, but see above - plus no sidewalks in many places.  I heard from folks at work that you can take a pedestrian above-ground walkway followed by an underground tunnel.  Say whaaa?  So I figured I'd better try it out on a weekend first.

Turns out - that's pretty accurate directions.  Start with the walkway that leads to the Pavilion mall, but take a left after the escalator and follow the walkway, following the English signs for Suria-KLCC (city center) - the mall above which I work (did I mention it's all-mall-all-the-time here??).  The walkway is bright, air conditioned 

What the walkway looks like - from another walkway! :)

(somewhat), and police / guards are in easy evidence (is safe).  You get to the end by the Convention Center, go out and take an escalator down, around the food court and entrance to the aquarium, and keep following the signs through an underground tunnel (think airport or mall corridor).  I took it all the way to see where exactly it comes out so that I know where to go on my way home.  20ish minutes (plus getting to the walkway) and voila - in the basement of work-mall, and only a total of 5 mins outside (getting to the walkway).  Pretty key during rainy season.

- You may have noticed - malls.  Everywhere.  For everything.  I'm starting to build my immunity...

Bathroom stall in fancy mall that cost RM 2
(about$.50) to use.  There was both TP and
the water hose thing.  This one was very nice
and clean and in good repair.

- Some toilets are still squat ones;  the stalls at work in the women's loo have 1 squatty and 2 regular, though all have little tiny sinks in them, at hand-washing level - as well as the regular sinks outside the stalls.  In the malls, even though they're crazy chi-chi (shee-shee?), don't always expect American pristineness.  Broken doors, ruining out of paper, or even no paper at all by design!  There are these hoses everywhere I guess you're supposed to use like a bidet, though I'm not really clear on the mechanics or expectation about drying off.  Note to self - carry lots of extra Kleenex just in case!  Oh, and today I noticed one public bathroom had instead of a paper towel dispenser by the sinks (they had air dryers) - a single TP roll dispenser on the wall.  Huh.

Feet washing before massage

- It's interesting to see how things work in a place where labor is cheaper than materials - for example, the hotel is under construction, and there are people whose job it appears to be to stand at awkward locations to point the right direction to go.  Or at my massage, they charged for extra oil, but went 15 minutes over time.

- I tried a massage at a place in (you guessed it) one of the malls.  This is what finally nudged me too undertake the search for how to cross the street to get around the block.  Lovely place, you first get your feet washed and are given slippers to go the few feet to one of the tiny room-spaces.  No table - just a thick pad on the floor.  Definitely not in the US anymore.

View from the 75th floor.

- At work with the client, it is in fact the case that men do not shake hands with women;  I expected this from some cultural training I got through work.  However a coworker here insists that it's more that men expect women to initiate such contact, though I'm not sure that's true.  I figure I'll stay on the safe side and follow the clients' lead.

- When it rains... it RAINS.  And boy, traffic just stops and it can take an hour to get home (just getting the Uber takes ages...)  In fact, one of my next adventures will be to find a better place to catch an Uber from work.  Where I'm at there's a big road and smaller one-way ones looping to the front off the towers, and the small ones get insanely congested at the entrances.  All 3 times I got an Uber home from work, they circled the neighborhood for 15-30 minutes, and it was pretty challenging finding them.  If I can find a way to cross the road (again with the road crossing!), I may be able to have an easier time of it.

View of the park behind the towers.  I figured
out how to get to it, sort of, but during the day
it's too damn hot;  so may try to check it out some
morning, perhaps next week.  The ridged building
at the top I think is the aquarium.

- Getting something "to go" is actually "takeaway".  How delightfully British!  And good to know that it's actually possible to do this, both by itself and when not finishing a meal.  I just wasn't sure, but now I have empirical evidence.

- In my quest for mall immunity, I learned that elevators are my friends!  No need to walk through all the crap to get to other levels.  Thing is... and this is very interesting, I learned that you have to be mindful of which set of buttons you push in the elevator!  At least in the Pavilion mall (the one closest to me), the elevator had two sets of buttons, one on the front door and one on the back door.  Now, although they both are numbered the same, if you press a button on the back door, that's only FOR the back door.  So if I want to get to the walkway and press 3 (yes, inexplicably the walkway is on level 3), if I press the button in the back of the elevator, I'll be let out into some sort of back hall cavernous place instead of where I want to go.  Huh.

The Petronas Towers - really are quite lovely.

- The view from 75th floor is stupendous, really lovely.  The pictures just can't do it any justice.  It's funny to see all the tourists hanging out on 42 by the walkway - it apparently costs around RM100 (c. $25) to go up there.  Too bad my workteam will be moving to the 12th floor starting this coming week.

- I don't even hear the construction noise anymore when I'm in my room at the hotel.  It's there, but I don't really register it.  I sleep with ear plugs, and so far no issues.

- The hotel is nice enough, but no make up mirror to be had (I even asked).  Guess this may be a local purchase if still needed after I move into a serviced apartment (location and time TBD).

Artsy.

- There's a funny distribution of goods at the drug stores - e.g. I only found 2 types of hairspray (and the one I tried is... weird; I can tell lots of stuff comes out because of the cloud above my head, but I can't feel anything on my hair... And yes, I'm spraying at my hair!) but there are 80 different body washes.  No hair mousse, but 50 different shampoos.  Lots of fragrance, and even disposable underwear. And apparently only roll-on deodorant? At the same time, lots and lots of familiar brands and products, from shampoo to toothpaste.  So - no big issues yet, but I will likely be asking for a few things from home once I fully assimilate what's what...

A few funnies:

- One of our initiatives at work is called "e-Tendering";  one of my coworkers (Indian) was saying something about it, and I along with another coworker (also Indian) heard "eat and drink";  so now it's the "eat and drink" project! :)

Street view on the other side of Pavilion mall. 
Not sure if that's a walkway or raised road.
But on THIS side of the mall there appeared to
be regular cross-walks...

- Everyone at work speaks pretty good English;  my joke now is that there's no reason for me to learn Bahasa at all, but I'd be better served learning Hindi given how many Indian coworkers I have and their tendency to fall into speaking Hindi!

From 75th floor.