Spectrum of the Seas Review: Day 3 – Kuala Lumpurfeatured
Usually when we travel, we’re up with the sun. Even if we’re tired, even if we’re sunburned and achy, we can usually rally, get up early and get out into wherever it is in the world we are.
I’ve always wondered what it would take to be at peace with slowing down and sleeping in, and I finally have my answer: 23 hours of flights in two and a half days. Between the jet lag and the full body achiness, Stephanie and I didn’t even need to debate it out. We slept in, and we took the day easy.
((By sleeping in, we were up at 8:00 AM. By taking it easy, we only walked 13,000ish steps. But hey, it’s progress for us!))
I should probably take a step back and explain how we ended up in Kuala Lumpur before our cruise. See, we were originally going to go to Thailand. I’ve always wanted to go to Thailand and the US dollar seems to go far there (I’ve had friends tell me that you can stay in a five-star resort with your own private villa and pool for, like, less than $200 a night). But after tracking airfare for months, fares originating in Chicago just weren’t coming down. So we started looking at other places that were close to Singapore (where we’d get on the cruise ship) and where the US dollar went far, and ultimately Instagram led us to Kuala Lumpur, which checked both of those boxes. I was always kind of ambivalent towards visiting Malaysia, but the more vlogs Stephanie showed me and the more fun places I found on Instagram to put on my city map, the more excited I got.
We knew we had to be efficient in our sightseeing with only two and a half days in our visit, but we hadn’t accounted for how terrible we’d feel after our flights. So on our first day, we headed to breakfast in the club lounge at the hotel to plan out our day.
The club lounge at the Mandarin Oriental was only available to people booked in club-level rooms, which meant it was almost never crowded. It offered all kinds of refreshments all day, as well as breakfast, afternoon tea, snacks and an evening reception that was touted as light bites and hors d’oeuvres but was really a full-on dinner spread. During breakfast hours, the lounge had all kinds of breads, fruits and breakfast items across all kinds of nationalities, as well as an amazing made-to-order omelette station that offered the softest, most fluffy omelettes I’ve ever had. And, bonus, the lounge also had amazing views of the Petronas Towers and downtown KL. We were beyond thrilled with our decision to book a club-level room.
Stephanie’s number one thing she wanted to see was the Thean Hou Temple, a colorful Buddhist temple dedicated to the heavenly queen Thean Hou. We used Grab again for the 20-ish minute drive (which set us back around $4) and when we arrived, it was packed. Most of the people swarming in were locals coming to worship, so we wanted to make sure we weren’t in anyone’s way as tourists (though we were far from the only ones!).
The temple was colorful and just absolutely breathtaking, with sweeping views of the city skyline and vibrant colors contrasting against the blue sky. Visually it was stunning and though small, we spent about an hour and a half walking around, taking pictures and taking in everything around us.
We were lucky in that the forecast was calling for thunderstorms and we didn’t get a drop while we were out there, but much to it’s reputation, the air in Kuala Lumpur was thick and humid, the heat index well beyond 100 degrees under the bright morning sun. We tried to get a Grab car to take us back to the hotel so we could rehydrate and take a quick nap, but the first car was stuck in traffic and cancelled on us after 20 minutes. A second car said they couldn’t come up to the temple and cancelled on us, too. We ultimately had to walk all the way down to the street level, down some steep inclines and curves, to the side of a highway where we had another Grab come and get us in front of the first building we could find. Safe? Maybe not, but we got to the hotel in one piece.
After a quick nap, we decided to head out again to see the Petronas Twin Towers, which were conveniently located mere steps from our hotel! The Petronas Towers are probably the landmark most synonymous with Kuala Lumpur, a set of steel skyscrapers that at one time were the tallest buildings in the world (from 1998, when they overtook my hometown Sears Tower on the list, through 2004, when they were dethroned by the Taipei 101 building). Even today, they’re the tallest twin towers, which is still pretty remarkable. I’ve always seemed to gravitate towards skyscrapers. I’ve written before about how, growing up in a big city like Chicago, it takes a little more for cityscapes to kind of get me to hitch my breath in awe, but the Petronas Towers definitely fit the bill. They are truly beautiful and a sight to behold!
There are plenty of vantage points for photos (including the club lounge at our hotel!), but the most common one is in the front of them, beyond the fountains. There are no less than a dozen people trying to sell wide angle phone lenses so you can get the whole thing in, but like the pro I am, I brought my own 🙂
We decided not to go into the towers and instead headed next door to the Suria KLCC, one of the biggest shopping malls I’ve ever been to. Have we ever talked about my feelings about shopping malls? I love shopping malls. I love the experience of being in them. I love walking around them. I love the nostalgia they bring because when I was growing up, they were a big part of my childhood – we’d go to the mall every Saturday with Mom and grandma and when I was a teenager, I’d go just about every week with my friends. My affinity towards malls and shopping is ultimately what led me to a career in merchandising – it just comes naturally to me. I have mixed feelings about the way online shopping has impacted brick and mortar and the death of the American shopping mall (mixed mostly because, you know, I work in online retail), and it was so fascinating to me that in a city as modern as Kuala Lumpur, the physical shopping mall is not only alive and well – it’s thriving. The mall was packed in a way I haven’t seen since maybe the late 1990’s. And it wasn’t really Malaysian shops. Instead, they were the shops I grew up with (Bath and Body Works, for one!), designers I love and shop at home (Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Dior, Tory Burch – literally every major label seemed to have a shop here!) and the staples like Sephora and The Body Shop. There were dozens of restaurants, coffee shops and kiosks. It was like stepping back in time to when shopping malls were still the place to hang out on a weekend with a modern design and amenities. I was in heaven.
As we were walking through the mall, we spotted a McDonalds and headed straight over. One, it was already mid-afternoon and we hadn’t eaten since early in the morning and two, we love visiting international McDonalds and trying the local specialties. Like instead of fries, our cheeseburgers came with a cup of corn. And instead of a soft drink, I had something that tasted like iced chocolate milk? Even the cheeseburgers tasted a little different. I dug it.
And then, as we were looking for the exit, we caught the distinctive whiff of Chicago-style popcorn (a mix of buttered popcorn, cheese popcorn and caramel popcorn). And I thought to myself, it couldn’t be – I was in Malaysia of all places, clear on the literal other side of the world. Sure enough, my local popcorn shop, Garrett’s, was sitting there in the middle of the mall. Go freaking figure. I have three Garrett’s within a half-mile radius of my apartment, but I’ve never seen it outside of the Chicagoland area. We picked up a bag because even though we can get it at home, it’s the best popcorn!
At this point, the sky had absolutely opened up and it was raining cats and dogs. I guess in Kuala Lumpur, the forecast will call for thunderstorms just about all day every day, but it will only rain in short spurts – just very intensely. We walked along the perimeter of the mall on the KLCC Park side, where there were some overhangs because when we were back at the hotel earlier, of course we took the umbrellas and ponchos out of our purses because it was sunny and they were heavy!
Thankfully, we stayed mostly dry as we shuffled back to the hotel, where they were just starting afternoon tea service in the club lounge. We sipped on tea and indulged in some freshly-baked scones and mini desserts, the Petronas Towers just out the window, and watched the rain pour down on the city below.
Jetlag was rearing its ugly head again, so we headed back to the room for, you guessed it, another nap. I was so against napping and by mid-day, I just gave up and gave into it.
We woke up just in time for the evening reception service in the lounge. The description touted cocktails and hors d’oeuvres but what they call hors d’oeuvres, I call dinner. There was a full spread of breads, spreads, salads, cheeses and charcuterie and a hot food line of all kinds of yummy Indian dishes, as well as some Swedish meatballs, mashed potatoes and other generic dinner foods. If that wasn’t enough, there was also a full dessert spread and an array of wines and liquors. We munched on some poppadom and salad, but we had bigger plans for dinner that we didn’t want to miss out on by eating too much in the lounge!
I’ve said before that if you put me in any city, I’ll gravitate towards three things: coffee shops, murals and food markets. I had a list of coffee shops to visit the next two days of our trip and I still hadn’t found the murals yet, but the food market? I had that covered. A short 15-minute walk from the hotel was Tapak Urban Street Dining, a small park that opens in the evening with around a dozen or so food trucks and stalls serving all kinds of Malay and international cuisine. The park doesn’t open until 6:00 PM and I’ve read it doesn’t really get busy until around 10:00 PM, but we arrived around 6:45 PM and I thought it was pretty packed.
The park had trucks around the perimeter with a large dining area in the middle. There was live music and a chill atmosphere and best of all, really good food. We couldn’t have asked for anything better.
We took a lap around before settling on a truck, where we split a bowl of beef satay with rice cubes, cucumbers and onions that were drenched in a delicious peanut sauce. And since the humidity was off the charts and the rain did nothing to ease the evening heat, we also got some fresh coconut juice to keep hydrated with.
We took a walk through another shopping mall, Avenue K, on the way back. It wasn’t as expansive or as high-end as Suria KLCC, but it did have some strong air conditioning and that’s all we really wanted, anyways! A day in Malaysia and we already appreciated their appreciation for air conditioning. When we’ve visited Europe in the late spring/early summer months, it’s been the complete opposite, so any place that likes to keep their A/C on full blast just the way I like it? That’s a place I’ll always want to be.
As we walked through KLCC Park on our way back, there were hundreds of people splayed out on the steps and knolls around the fountains. Every evening, there are fountain shows with music and lights and we didn’t realize it was as popular as it ended up being, and since we were right next to the hotel already, we figured we’d just stay and see what it was. The area in front of the fountains were jam packed, but the area on the far side was mostly empty. I found it bizarre because that was the side with the best view – you could see the Petronas Towers over the fountains. We set up there and the area slowly filled in. Once it was dark, we were dazzled with an energetic show of fountains and colors. It was the perfect way to end our first day.
After a round of showers to get off a day’s worth of sticky humidity, we turned in. Crazy Rich Asian’s was on TV, but nap number three was calling my name and I missed most of it (yes, you read that right – I napped again at night instead of just turning in to bed. This was a recurring theme throughout our trip and probably messed with my sleep schedule far more than anything else). I was pleasantly surprised to see so many US channels (like The Food Network!) available at the hotel. We like to wind down with mindless television at night and usually when we travel internationally, we’re limited to CNN International, so it was a treat to have programming of a lighter nature to relax with as we planned for a busy day two in Kuala Lumpur!
