Kuala Lumpur

This past weekend Kevin, Landon, and I went to KL for the Future Music Festival. My last class on Thursday ended at 1800 and we took a bus scheduled to leave at 1820. It was a bit of a scramble to get to the station on time, but we needn't have worried, the bus was an hour late. We arrived in KL around midnight and followed excellent directions to our hostel. It was a cheap backpacker's hostel, but it was located in the middle of Chinatown and had a place to hang out on the roof. After we checked in we headed to the roof to eat some snacks. The mango pudding we picked up turned out to be separated and generally odd, but the SuperStarz Ⓡ flavored chips were quite good. 

The street market.
(photocred: Landon)

We spent most of Friday on Petaling Street, the street market in Chinatown, haggling with hawkers for decent prices. The first price they named was generally six to eight times the reasonable price, so each purchase took quite some time. I came away with an Armani belt (genuine leather I was assured, though it is quite obviously not), Landon found a Rolex, and Kevin bought a bottle of Hugo Boss cologne.
We found our lunch in a dark alley at a Chinese food stall that served delicious noodles for five ringitt. We then headed across town to KL Central station to get a pass to the public transportation system and to meet up with some friends who live in Borneo but happened to be in KL for the weekend. It was much farther and hotter than we anticipated. We arrived five minutes after the counter closed, so we decided to explore nearby Little India. 

We ate supper with Ethan and Queena, their kids, and friend Dawn, and spent the evening playing Settlers of Catan with a lovely view of the Petronas Towers. I was tempted to run the few kilometer back to our hostel, but the voice of reason (Landon, in this instance) prevailed and we took a taxi. Probably was a better decision, three white guys wandering the streets of KL after midnight might not be the safest of situations.

Saturday morning we explored KL a bit more, visiting City Center and the Petronas towers. After some more delicious alley noodles we made our way to the music festival. A series of one to two minute delays meant that we missed the bus and the train, so we had to wait half an hour for the next one. Fortunately we found a McDonalds with one-ringitt ice-cream cones so it was a pleasant wait.

We made it to the festival just as it started to rain and most of the bands we were interested in played later in the evening so we just wandered around for a while. The storm passed leaving magnificent clouds, and the sun set in a blaze of glory.

Temper Trap was quite good, and PSY was the next attraction for us. We spent about half an hour before his performance worming our way to the center of the crowd. He came onstage and chatted with the crowd about his rise to fame and how exhausting it was. This was his last scheduled performance, and he said he was looking forward to a respite. The crowd enjoyed his first two songs, but really went wild with Gangnam Style. It was quite an experience being part of such an immense, energetic mass of humanity.

fun. played next and as people left after PSY Kevin and I made our way forward to about the fourth row from the stage. Landon wasn't feeling great so he made his way out of the crowd and found a place where he could sit and watch the performance. Apparently there were some technical difficulties, and it took about forty-five minutes to set up. Every time anything changed, the lights dimmed, or they ran a sound check, applause would break out in anticipation, and then fade in disappointment. When they finally appeared they put on quite a show. They seemed to be genuinely enjoying themselves and the audience was nearly as excited as it had been for PSY.

Landon's headache had worsened and he decided to head back to the hostel. Kevin and I sat on a curb for a while, listened to Kill the Noise, stretched our backs and legs and watched people. It was quite entertaining observing the varying levels of inebriation and enthusiasm. Some people were completely dead by that point, and just stood staring into space, some danced their way around instead of walking, and some jovially handed out beer.
The Prodigy was something of a disappointment, more metal than the electronic sound that I know from their recordings. After several attempts by the crowd to crush us in a mosh pit, we decided to go check out Bloc Party. I quite enjoyed their music, and their light show was also pretty great.
We left a few songs before the end to beat the crowds and try to find a cheap taxi. The first few we asked quoted absurdly high prices, so we kept looking until we found someone who actually used the meter that is required by law. He was one of the most pleasant taxi drivers I have encountered yet; his prices were reasonable, his driving was skilled, and we chatted on our way back to the hotel.
I returned to UTP for a week of quizzes, assignments, and lab reports. I was assigned a twenty-page group paper last week, for which we must interview a local business. Group projects are not my forte, neither are writing nor interviewing, so it's going to be fun.
Sadly not the band.