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KL Reflections

Posted by Stuart at 04:30 PM on October 19, 2003

As I said yesterday, we decided to stay at a four-star hotel for our extra night in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Our joke was that our first hotel in KL was a four-star -- two stars the first night and two stars the second. This time, however, we were getting all four stars in one night.

After checking in to the Concorde Hotel in the middle of downtown KL, we headed down to the pool. The hotel is just a few blocks from the world-famous Petronas Towers. Until today, they were the world's tallest buildings, but now the new tower being built in Taipei has overtaken them. (And I will get to visit that building when I visit Taiwan in December.)

As I was sitting in my lounge chair and admiring the reflection of the towers in the hotel pool, I reflected a bit on my "New Life in Asia". Of course I had heard about the world's tallest buildings before, but they were in some small insignificant (to me) Asian country that I would never have the desire to or a reason to visit. Then, I moved to this side of the planet and even still I hesitated to visit them since they were in a Muslim country, and if you believe some people these days, Muslims and Americans just don't mix.

But here I was, soaking up the last few bits of sunlight that were shining on these two huge silver towers and soaking up as much of the Muslim culture and history as I could in my three days here. Needless to say, the world is a lot different looking at it from this side. For just a moment, I was acutely aware that I was very very happy to be here.