A Case of the Mondays

We had hoped to make it to the eastern coast of Peninsular Malaysia. You see Malaysia has two geographical areas – Peninsular Malaysia, which shares a border with Thailand and Singapore; and Malaysia Borneo, which shares the world’s third largest island with Brunei and Indonesia in the South China Sea. With all this geography for us to run wild in we were unable to. No buses were heading east due to the monsoons. We could have flown, but may just end up sitting in a hotel room due to the heavy rains. So, we stalled and stayed a couple extra days in Kuala Lumpur (KL). KL is a very liveable and manageable city with a few tourist attractions and we had saved one of the famous for last.

The Patronas Towers are a Kuala Lumpur landmark

A monument to the government’s commitment to their policy Vision 2020 – to make Malaysia a fully developed country by the year 2020.

The Patronas Towers were the tallest buildings in the world until 2004 when Taiwan built the Taipei 101 building. The Patronas Tower’s magnificent twin towers dominate the cityscape and we had saved going up to the 41^st floor skybridge for our last full day in Kuala Lumpur. That is until we were told the towers are CLOSED on Mondays! So we quickly took a picture and reconsidered what we could do on our last day.

We couldn’t come up with anything that would make us feel better other than dim sum

We have said it before, we are extremely lucky to be in Malaysia during several large cultural celebrations and staying in Chinatown allowed us to witness several days of lion dances.Many businesses in Chinatown hire lion dance companies to come and ring in the new year with a lion dance ceremony. The lion represents guardians in Buddhist cultures and only the lion can exorcise demons. So businesses hire lion dance companies to bring in good luck and fortune and vanquish last year’s demons and misfortunes, as well as keep any new demons away, done with loud cymbals and firecrackers.

This year is the Year of the Ox – both of ours’ zodiac year. And we’re going to need all the good fortune we can get.