Kuala Lumpur day two

 Now that it’s Monday, I’m doing another side quest. Since I’m in a place where it’ll be cheaper to handle than it would be in the US, I’m off to see if I can get my camera repaired. There’s a promising spot that seems to specialize in film cameras not far outside of the city center. Predictably, it’s in a shopping mall. New country new address format, I’m wandering around this place for what feels like an eternity trying to figure out where I’m supposed to be. Eventually I find it. The head honcho is out to lunch. Fine by me, I’m hungry too and the man still working has a good lunch recommendation. 

The new kills the old

Vegetarian Chinese food. What a change of pace from standard Malay fare. The meat here has been delicious but I’m happy to skip it for a bit. One of the staffers is intrigued to see someone so pale so far away from the main tourist zone and sits down with me. We talk about our travels. He’s a hairdresser by trade and spent years wandering the earth cutting hair. The joy of having a portable skill. We’re talking US politics and he asks me some questions about our current bout of civil unrest. I’m struggling to explain it. To an American, the police coming to your city is already indicative of ill intent. Explaining to a Malaysian that our government only works for us when we force them to is a difficult cultural barrier to bridge. Explaining that twice now immigration police have shot and killed people who were neither criminals nor immigrants proves damn near impossible. That makes me sad.

After we finish chatting I head back to the repair shop. The head tech picks up my Zorki, scowls at it, and says no in Malay through his assistant. On to the next one. I head to the south side of the city. The shop is a 20 minute walk from the metro. I attempt for about 20 minutes to walk it and get about a block away. KL is hell for pedestrians. Yes it’s safe, but there are so many controlled access roads that being a pedestrian means you’re stuck navigating a maze of overpasses, weird dead ends, and multilevel intersections. This place is less intuitive to navigate on foot than Delhi. Once I realized that I’d made it to a dead end I hailed a cab and drove the rest of the way.

The camera store is in, you guessed it, a mall. They take one look at the camera, politely decline to work on it, and refer me back to the first shop. Since I’m a glutton for punishment I try to walk to another metro station from the shop. The whole excursion took me seven hours in total. This city is expensive and has robbed me of so much time. I cannot understand why it’s so difficult to get around.

Jail. It’s all Jail.

After a siesta I’m mentally prepared to confront the world again. I head to Chinatown for dinner. Who knows what, there’s a lot of good options to be had there. I found a place doing some lovely beef noodles. I came. I saw. I ate. Now with thirst, I walked to a nearby bar for quenching.

With a name like Baiju, I had simple expectations. Baiju is the world’s most popular spirit. The local Chinese firewater, sorghum is fermented in pits whole and then turned into a liquid for distillation. It’s absolutely horrendous. Of all the hooches I’ve tried over the years, Baiju has repeatedly proven itself to be totally irredeemable. Giving a bar that name is a bold move and I had middling expectations. The end result was more than I could have hoped. There were zero Baiju cocktails on the menu. Not one. I closed the menu in disbelief and walked out. I’ll be damned if I come to Asia and drink tequila. It just feels dumb. 

At another bar in Chinatown I settled in with a spin on a Vesper and a pu-erh Negroni. Fun fun. The back of the menu had suggestions for my next destination and I settled on a place I had been avoiding for being too on the nose. As I’m giving up on this city, I went to a tiki bar. The bar is in fancy town and is actually not a tiki bar. Like Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco, it’s a rum bar that dresses as a tiki bar to pay the bills. They have over 300 bottles behind the counter. Ranging from the ordinary to the extraordinary. If you have the money, you can sip on genuine British Navy Black Tot. For my fish cocktail, I had the endless daiquiri. To start, you choose a rum from the bar. A shot of that is poured into a barrel where it melds with the choices of all those before you. No two daiquiris are the same. What a fun concept. I started talking KL, tiki, rum, and foodservice with the staff. Since the bar was dead, they were happy to oblige me. They led me to a bottle I was shocked to not have seen in Long Beach, some really fabulous Cambodian rum. Being that the LBC has a fantastic cocktail scene and a large Cambodian population, it seemed natural that we would be pouring it. I hope we can rectify this in the future. The bar owner tells me about the difficulties of his business here. Currently, no new licenses are granted to foreign owned bars. You cannot serve Muslims. For Malaysians, this is divulged on your national ID card but bartenders are encouraged to profile. The religious police come by periodically to check on this. No liquor is distilled within the borders so all hooch is imported. There are two breweries left in the country. Basically the only domestic beers are Tiger and Guinness products. Tiger is actually cheaper in the US as an import than it is in Malaysia as a domestic. You can thank the 210% excise tax on alcohol for that. I guess it wasn’t just tourist pricing, drinking here is a rich man’s game.

I clocked out and went for supper, a suggestion of the bar staff. They decide that Nasi Goring I had last night wasn’t it (they’re right the rice was subprime) and they directed me to a 24 hour spot on the way back to my hotel. Needless to say, it was fantastic. We need this in the US.

I’ve finally decided I know what KL feels like. This is Vegas without the casinos and with better food. I don’t like Vegas either. Go figure.