Confession time: we totally did Kuala Lumpur in a Hemispheres magazine kind of way, only even shorter.

We flew in yesterday evening from Singapore, booked a decent room in an Indian-run Chinatown hostel, and ate nasi lempak for dinner (it’s a breakfast food) at a semi swanky rum bar with a Korean-looking piano lounge singer and a loud quartet playing cards and getting drunk at the next table over. We then hit the street market, where I bought four pairs of socks for less than $4. How can socks cost less than coffee? Why did I feel like I slipped down a rabbit hole into the ur-Asian city? Anyway, it was a new passport stamp dated to The Professor’s birthday, woo hoo!

This morning we arose and hightailed it to the US embassy, stopping only for street snacks and a bit of graffiti viewing along the way.

The Professor got some new pages added to his passport. Interestingly, the waiting room had a flatscreen showing advertisement videos for American universities and tourist destinations. The colleges included CU Boulder and Howard and a school in Missouri. They played up their science, business and law programs. I suppose people don’t send their kids away to another country for school for the sake of a literature degree.

Also interesting: aside from the Golden Gate bridge, the thing most used to sell Malaysians on San Francisco tourism are images of Chinese and Indian dancers! I imagine they have nonstop Bhangra here already in spades?

We next hailed a taxi to the National Museum, which traces the history of the Malay people from prehistory to the present. It’s a good museum, but we noticed something curious about the exhibits: all the artifacts illustrating the TYPES of objects that were important in the 1400s and earlier were 19th-century artifacts, until you got back to the Paleolithic-dig type stuff. I mentioned this to the professor, and he wondered aloud if they hadn’t all been taken during the colonial era.

Then we got to the next room, and found out that after conquering Malacca, the Portuguese man of war Alfonso de Albequerque loaded up a big old ship with Malaccan treasure for his king. The ship sank. Oh. THAT is who lost the would-be exhibits.

Well, him and his country, and then the Dutch, and then the English, and then the Japanese during the war. Suddenly, the whole Malaysian-preference thing in public policy made a lot more sense, problematic as that is as a moral matter for me and a practical one for the minorities here. You recall that policy, don’t you, from The Professor’s entries about Singapore?

That was my take away from the national museum, that Malaysia is a place rich in resources and blessed by the gods as a great trading location, and as such has rarely been left to her own devices.

Leaving the museum, we walked through a lovely lakefront park to the Museum of Islamic Art, which was dazzling in its breadth, beauty, and in the quality of its exhibits. The first floor features art and architecture from Southeast Asia, China, India, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. The second breaks it down into categories: embroidery and fabric arts, jewelry, ceramics, illuminated manuscripts (my favorite) and others. Takeaway feeling: Islam is HUGE, which is obvious but is different when you have it all illustrated for you. Definitely recommend this museum if you are in town.

We then went to the planetarium and space museum across the street and caught the planetarium show. The show and museum were both good, but what really caught my attention was the way that astronomy was depicted as an Islamic science. Rightly so, given how much Islamic scientists and mathematicians contributed to the field, particularly in the Middle Ages when progress in the sciences was so brilliant in the Islamic world and so lackluster elsewhere. But it was odd, odd to me to realize that, though these discoveries were not Malaysian, that the audience would feel they were part of their self-history because of the religious identity. It is… Different from how I perceive the world. Visually, it was also odd to see a star museum where the images of stars were surrounded by borders of Islamic geometric star patterns, and where the observatory sat atop a tower like a minaret. I liked it a lot.

We ate dinner at a mall food court in the iconic Petronas Towers, and blew off actually paying to ascend the towers in order to catch Cloud Atlas at the mall cinema. Good call! We learned that movie theaters are still where young people can go to cuddle when their parents might be a bit strict about their behavior elsewhere. So cute! The movie was fun, largely because it combines all of your favorite genres, so you can have your post-apocalyptic sci-fi, your high-seas adventure, your moody English prewar art lads and your Matrix all in one movie.

We came home, had a snack, and I tried durian. I wanted to like the reviled breadfruit. The king of fruits! I liked the juice. I liked it in baked goods. I even liked the faint odor of it. But reader, the fruit defeated me fresh-sliced and fragrant. It was gross. Although, I only got the 10 rumiah type, maybe the 25 rumiah one is better. For now I will stick with the mangosteen, queen of fruits, and the delicious juices of the soursop fruit and the kedongdong fruit.

We fly to Siem Reap tomorrow morning.

– The Private Eye