Kuala Lumpur and Singapore with the Family

I woke up around 5:20 am and got ready to go. I woke up my roommate right before I was about to leave so that I could say goodbye because she was leaving to go to Korea that night and I didn’t know if I would be in HK or not.

I arrived at the airport at around 7am, checked in at both Malaysia Airlines and Cathay Pacific and was told at both that my odds weren’t good but that I would be told at around 8:05. I grabbed a bagel and hung out around the staff registration counter, waiting to hear anything. 8:15 came and went and I still did not have word on my chances. At the last second they called all standby passengers to Kuala Lumpur and I got on the flight!

I got to KL at around 12:30 and came outside to arrivals. I was fully prepared to take my own taxi to the hotel and meet my family there but when I exited arrivals, I saw my dad waiting for me! He looked excited to see me and I, of course, was happy to see him as well.

We waited for my mom and then we waited for my brother, who was arriving at a completely separate terminal on Air Asia. After he arrived, we got into a taxi and went to check into our hotel. We arrived at The Legend Hotel and put our stuff in storage and headed out to the Batu Caves. It was raining earlier in the day but when we got to the caves it was completely dry. We climbed all 272 steps to the top. There were monkeys everywhere! They were occupied by a barrel of oranges left out for them. My brother told me that he saw one shoot past in front of my dad as my dad was concentrating on climbing the steps. Pretty funny. We got to the top and walked in and were astonished by the vastness of the caves themselves.

The Batu Caves are essentially a Hindu temple. It was pretty neat to see a temple inside the cave and we stayed for a good time marveling at marvelous cave.

After awhile, we climbed back down, had some fresh coconut and then headed back to the hotel so that we could move our stuff into our room and then head out to the bus station to pick up tickets to Singapore for the following day. We took the train to the station, asked each bus company which buses they had, settled on one and bought a ticket for 39 Ringet per person (12ish a person).

We made our way from the bus station to the city center where we marveled at the Patronus Towers. I’ll have pictures up in Picasa but these towers are connected by a skywalk that you can go up to for free if you have a reservation. We were in KL during a public holiday so unfortunately we could not go up to the top. It was beautiful though. The towers almost didn’t look real because of the way it was lit up. It was pretty gorgeous.

After wandering around the city a little, we went back to a mall next to our hotel and we had dinner together. We went back to our hotel and went to sleep because we had to get up early to get over to the bus station to catch our bus to Singapore.
We got to the bus station around 8:35 am for our 9am bus and bought some snacks for the bus ride. We meandered over to Platform 20, found our bus, and got ready for the 5 hour bus ride.

The bus left about 45 minutes late and all of us fell asleep almost immediately. I woke up a couple times to take pictures of the scenery but it was mostly banana trees and green grass so after some time I just went back to sleep again.

After awhile, we exited the vehicle and made our way through Malaysian immigration and back to the bus where we were told we had to wait for a different bus because that was the bus had clearance to go into Singapore as opposed to our bus. We got on the new bus, and were driven to Singaporean immigration. We went through immigration, went back on the bus and were driven into town where we were dropped off around 5 blocks away from our hotel.

We checked into our hotel and then went into the city to walk around. We walked from one station, across a bridge to Merlion Park aand One Fullerton where we saw the Merlion with the skyline in the background. After sitting for some time, we left and went over to Little India where we walked around and had dinner.

There was such a difference between Little India and the rest of Singapore. My brother told me that Little India is considered the dirtiest part of Singapore (environment wise). Which is really just sad.

After wandering around Little India for some time, we made our way back to One Fullerton so that my brother could get some really awesome pictures with his fancy camera. We headed back to the hotel and went to sleep early so that we could get to the airport bright and early.

We ended up not getting on the first flight back to Hong Kong but easily made the second one. What was interesting was that Cathay Pacific had 4 people working one flight and about 8 people working the later flight. It definitely didn’t follow queuing theory and I was pretty excited that I actually applied something that I had learned.