Menara KL by Day

...And this is the Menara KL!  (Menara means tower in Malay, so it's rather prosaically just the "Kuala Lumpur Tower".) The tower was built in the 1990s; its practical purpose is its 1381 foot antenna, used for television and radio communications, but of course such a tower also has plenty of uses for collecting vast amounts of money from tourists. The pod, the top of which is 1099 feet, has an observation deck and a revolving restaurant. Menara KL is the 24th-tallest freestanding structure in the world, and the seventh tallest tower. According to wikipedia, there's a race every year up the stairs to the pod, for those who are both in good shape and crazy.  There's also an apparently quite popular annual event in which professional parachutists (is that a word?) are hired to base jump from the top.  

Malaysian friendliness crosses over into their customer service--the tower is on top of an already fairly steep hill, so they have a free shuttle bus up and down.  And they didn't skimp on the shuttle bus...no golf-cart train or city bus with people packed in like sardines and holding on to a strap.  This was one of the nicest fifteen-passenger vans I've ever been in.  Squishy leather seats, good music playing, and air-conditioning blowing at full blast, with lots of vents, almost enough for everyone to have their own.  I had to wait a few minutes for more people to come along to fill it up before we went up, but I sure wasn't complaining. In fact, I rather wished they'd take a notion to go on a long expedition for gas or something.  I really didn't want to get out at the top.  Even the dashboard looked like something out of the future as it was so new and modern.  

But enough rhapsodizing about the joys of sitting in comfort in air-conditioning...up the tower! As soon as I stepped off the escalator up to the main entrance, I was greeted by one of the uniformed employees and shown the options--I could go to the observation deck for one price, or both the observation deck and also the open-air deck up even higher than the ball for about twice as much.  Well...I hadn't really planned on spending that much, but I wanted to get high as possible and the pictures would be infinitely better if they weren't through glass.  It was so high up that those who opted for the outdoor top deck had to sign a release form that they weren't responsible if we injured ourselves or somehow fell off.  [This turned out to be rather overcautious in my opinion; you would have to go to a great deal of trouble to hurt yourself or fall--there is a thick plexiglass wall chest high all the way around, and only one bump in the floor that you could even potentially trip on.]

The view out over the city is amazing--I could see for miles from up there, even on a slightly smoggy day.  I made several circuits around the tower, taking pictures from all angles, especially of the beautiful Petronas Towers, gleaming in the afternoon sun.  Eventually I found the tall building across the street from my hostel, Chinatown, and Merdeka Square.  It was after five by the time I made it up there, so I decided to dilly-dally around until it got dark to see the city light up--I certainly wasn't paying that much to come up again!  After I had taken at least ten pictures of every possible view and tried out all the setting of my new camera, including the silly ones like fish-eye and miniature toy, I sat down on a step and typed stuff on my phone, waiting on dark.  Just as it was allllllmost dark enough and lights were just beginning to come on, an employee came out and rushed me back inside...there was lightning in the area, and it wasn't safe to be out.  

Travel Advice in China: Shanghai

Prepare to spend a lot of money-- prices are high in Shanghai.  However, it’s fun place to visit. Take a walk along the Bund; on one side of you, there are 18th century European buildings; on the other is the river with the Pudong skyline on the other side.  I got some good pictures of the skyline from there.  One Saturday night, it seemed like half the city was down  there walking around. The Pudong area of Shanghai has some of the highest skyscrapers in the world, and there are three you can go up in: the Shanghai World Financial Center, the Oriental Pearl Tower, and the Jin Mao Tower.  The World Financial Center looks like a giant needle with a square eye cut out; you can go up to about the 100th floor.  I’m not sure of the cost, but probably between 100-200 Yuan. I went up the Jin Mao Tower, which is right next to the Financial Center.  I chose this one because from it you could get good views of the other two, which are more architecturally interesting.  In it, you can go up to the 88th floor (there is an observation deck with windows all around).  It cost 88 Yuan in 2010.  Just try not to do it at the same time as a group of 200 middle-schoolers from Wuhan like I did.  Oh, and what I did was go up close to sunset.  That way, I got to see the city by day, waited around up there while the sun set, and then got to see the city lights by night as well.  Might as well make the most of it!  I’m not sure how much the Oriental Pearl costs to go in; it’s the one that looks like a purple and silver tinker toy spaceship.  

There are plenty of other things you can do in Shanghai: shopping, museums, cute little neighborhoods that look European.  You’ll find them in any guide book or such.  Nanjing Road is worth a visit for the shopping and crowd scene; it’s right in the middle of everything, so you can’t really avoid it anyways. The other thing I really enjoyed was the food: I was working in Jingzhou, a smaller town in Hubei province.  The only good American food in Jingzhou was Pizza Hut, and there was very little other foreign food.  In Shanghai, there were Italian restaurants, French restaurants, Dairy Queen, Dunkin’ Donuts, Papa John’s, etc.  I really enjoyed having that kind of variety again! And, they had Mountain Dew! 

There is a neighborhood called Xujiahui which I particularly enjoyed; if nobody was speaking Chinese, you would think you were somewhere in Europe.  One subway stop up from Xujiahui, at the Hengsheng stop on the red line, is a district with tons of restaurants of all sorts.  

I stayed at the Captain Youth Hostel on Fuzhou Road, right off the Bund, when I was there.  It was fine, although the front desk staff weren’t terribly friendly.  It was nice to be only a few steps from the Bund and the river walk, but it was a pretty good walk  to the nearest subway stop.  However, in route to the subway, you do pass a Dunkin’ Donuts...Anyhow, next to the hostel, on Fuzhou Road, there was a really good Italian restaurant, if you’re looking for that type of thing.  Also on Fuzhou Road, five to seven blocks from  People’s Square, there are some  English-language bookstores.   If you go on google maps and zoom in, they are marked on the map.  

Oh, and it seems a lot of the guide books recommended a place call Qibao.  I don’t recommend it.  It’s ‘ye olde Chinese village’, and it’s a tourist trap in the worst way.  All the “quaint old shops” sell cheap sunglasses and popsicles and Hello Kitty key chains, and swarms of old people shuffle through jabbing you with the edges of their umbrellas.  This is really only for people who only go to Shanghai and have no chance to ever see anything else in China; you can see much much better ‘villages’ elsewhere.