Hot in the City

We had a bumper weekend! Saturday we headed into the city and started with brunch (I really dislike that word, but it's the most efficient way of describing the meal...) at this place:

OK, so it's a 'concept' cafe which is a tad off putting, but the coffee is good and so is the food. At least it's not a franchise! I do dig the menu design and the place itself is HUGE and decked out in a 'cool designer urban' style. Wallpaper, mid-century inspired furniture, that sort of thing, which I really don't mind. It's at the bottom of the Petronas Twin Towers, KL's answer to the NYC Twin Towers, when they were around.


There's a fountain next door, which is lovely. It spurts water you know.

It is obviously a big tourist attraction. There's a platform that runs between the two towers called the sky walk, but we haven't done it yet. And of course there's a mall. We checked out an exhibition by Jolly Koh there. He lectured at Adelaide TAFE once upon a time. Fancy that!

We left the mall and walked around in the heat for a while. Past the club strip (not strip club), where venues with names like 'The Beach Club' and 'The Rum Shack' reside. Hard to resist the temptation...
We were approached by a Buddhist Monk while on our stroll, all smiles and sweetness. Then he forced beads and tokens on us, and flipped through some photographs of a temple and got us to sign a form that said we wished for peace. Then asked for a donation. Trrrricky! All the other names on the form were from America, Australian and the like. They had all given amounts around the RM250 mark (about $80AUD). Cripes!! We 'donated' RM20, and were equally bemused and appalled at the forceful, overbearing nature of the monk. We were approached by four monks over the weekend, but we'd learnt our lesson.

After a good 45 minutes in the heat we headed for another mall. A bigger, fancier mall than the one before. Surprising then that we had a pretty bad meal there. Still, how could we not eat at a place that looked like this:



Then we headed out into the heat again and walked down to Kompleks Kraf, or Craft Complex if you need the English translation. It's mighty complex that houses many samples of traditional Malaysian craft - batik, wood carving, basket weaving. There's a retail space, exhibition space and, the most inspiring aspect, an artists village!! There are lots of small shacks scattered around the grounds where craft persons and artist work. Sweet sweet sweet. How I long for a shack/studio of my own! We didn't dedicate enough time to see it all, so shall have to go back. The images below are of one of the display rooms filled with hand crafted lamp shades. The images are poor quality but the effect, in real life, was beautiful.