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Kuala Lumpur; con-men
Nov. 28th, 2005 06:47 pmThis is a city that might have been designed for the sole purpose of showing Francois Mitterand how grands projets ought to be done.
It's littered with post-modern skyscrapers and post-modern mosques; it has the largest and busiest shopping mall I recall visiting (made the Mall of America look tame and empty, though possibly still large). It has, of course (this is south-east Asia), hideous traffic jams - in the city centre, a taxi is merely a cooler, rather than a quicker, way of getting from place to place. It's clean.
I arrived and was immediately befriended by a Chinese lady called Lin, who taught me how to greet people and how to count in Malay (Kabar bai! nama saya Tom, barapa duapolo dan lapan) and invited me to her house to talk to her sister about what it's like to study in London. When I got there I was taken aside by her uncle and had an infallible system for cheating at blackjack with the cooperation of the dealer explained to me; unaccountably, I did not accept the offer of being the patsy, and after a few sentences explaining that London housing was expensive, the London underground expensive (is it really two quid for an average return ticket), and London weather in December likely to be incomprehensibly cold from a Malay perspective, I got a taxi back to the hotel.
Is it really likely that I'm the kind of honest man whom it's difficult to con? It'd be nice to think so, though hideously over-flattering.
Tomorrow, the Batu Caves, then an afternoon of skyscraperwanderung before meeting up with the tour-group again.
It's littered with post-modern skyscrapers and post-modern mosques; it has the largest and busiest shopping mall I recall visiting (made the Mall of America look tame and empty, though possibly still large). It has, of course (this is south-east Asia), hideous traffic jams - in the city centre, a taxi is merely a cooler, rather than a quicker, way of getting from place to place. It's clean.
I arrived and was immediately befriended by a Chinese lady called Lin, who taught me how to greet people and how to count in Malay (Kabar bai! nama saya Tom, barapa duapolo dan lapan) and invited me to her house to talk to her sister about what it's like to study in London. When I got there I was taken aside by her uncle and had an infallible system for cheating at blackjack with the cooperation of the dealer explained to me; unaccountably, I did not accept the offer of being the patsy, and after a few sentences explaining that London housing was expensive, the London underground expensive (is it really two quid for an average return ticket), and London weather in December likely to be incomprehensibly cold from a Malay perspective, I got a taxi back to the hotel.
Is it really likely that I'm the kind of honest man whom it's difficult to con? It'd be nice to think so, though hideously over-flattering.
Tomorrow, the Batu Caves, then an afternoon of skyscraperwanderung before meeting up with the tour-group again.
