KUL: A Few Unrelated Observations

It was five days in KL. The heat and humidity have been well documented. Forgotten in that is the lack of wind. It has been consistently calm every day. Flags at hotels hang limply; trees are motionless. Of course, this exacerbates the impact of the heat and humidity. I'm sure there must be times when it gets windy, but not this week. It did rain however. Every day at about the same time late in the afternoon, there would be a pretty heavy downpour. Sometimes with some intense thunder and lightning. There was almost no distinction in weather patterns for any of the days I was in KL.

Service is important here too. They have lots of staff everywhere. The hotel has people everywhere who are anxious to help. (I endorse the Traders Hotel... it's good. I also commend Stefan who worked this week in the Traders Lounge.) The KL Convention Centre had people all over the place. At any event where finger food was being served by staff there were always more than enough people... Sometimes they'd be bumping into one another, sometimes just standing waiting for someone to want something. The worst/best of all were the event organizers for the conference. In case you couldn't figure out how to get from one part of the convention centre to another, they would post staff every 3 feet or so to tell you that you were heading in the right direction.

I've been in a lot of big cities in a lot of countries. Although KL is a modern city with very ambitious aspirations, it does not exude a feeling of safeness. Maybe I'm biased because I'm aware of a couple of incidents this week where people attending our event were robbed and an alleged shootout near our hotel, but I felt uneasy at times. In a place like New York, tourist areas are crawling with police. In KL I saw far more private security personnel than police.

Overall, I was impressed with KL's infrastructure for a city its size (it's apparently not that big... not as big as I thought anyway). I was impressed with the friendliness and helpfulness of most of the locals, and their language skills -- everyone speaks English. And I like the way that the Petronas Towers seem to be transparent when they are lit up at night.

I'm glad I had the chance to get there and I'd like to visit again sometime, but the heat and humidity might mean I'm not in a big hurry to go back right away.
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