Tales of a Travelin' Consultant: Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur surprised me - I found it to be clean, efficient and accessible especially for a SE Asian capital. I like the energy, and my first impressions turned into very good memories of the city.

Even though my head hit the pillow at 2am, I sprang out of bed at 7am to go visit the hyped Petronas Towers. My interest was picqued one Sunday evening years ago while watching an episode of The Amazing Race. I think it was the season with Charla and Mirna. Anyhow, the contestants needed to find and race to the top of the magnificent Petronas Towers (cue Phil Koegan's dramatic introduction...) Since that day, I associated Malaysia with the Petronas Towers and knew I would visit them someday.

Apparently there are a limited number of tickets available each day, and it is first-come, first-serve on the ticketing. I ended up at the end of the queue, actually 6th to last. Now, I probably won't be saying much positive about the Petronas Towers, but I will say they have the queueing situ figured out. They allow one person per group to wait in line. This makes for a misleadingly short queue, but is pretty efficient in terms of space. I got in line aroud 7:30 and the ticket office openes at 9. Once it opened, we learned they were having system problems and were unable to log into the ticketing program, so all tickets were being processes manually. While everyone groaned, I remained patient. I work in IT and have been partially responsible for much worse system problems (namely the disaster at Hawaiian Telcom) so I am always sensitive and a bit protective about system issues.

I was alone in line, but so was everyone else as they were seperated from their families and friends too. As the hours went by, we became quite chummy with our line neighbors. I was grilled by Ravi on everything from my annual salary (that's a personal question!) to details of my imaginery boyfriend. I had to make up answers on the spot and luckily took a lesson learned from Jan Brady and used a real person as my boyfriend instead of calling him Tim Glass or something. The interrogation was getting a bit excessive and I was running out of details of my imaginary boyfriend on Nusa Lembongan who just opened a surf shop. Ravi wasn't buying my story and called my bluff by asking, "How many boyfriends do you really have?"

Before I could answer, my angel Carol stepped in. Carol is from Manila but spent 5 years in Hawaii. Carol quick became my line buddy and we spent the majority of the 4 hour wait talking in advanced english. We finally got our tickets and i bummed around with Carol's motley crew from Hawaii and the Phillipines until our turn to summit Petronas.

The anticipation was great and we were ushered into a small theater that showed a brief video about the towers with the same suspense that
Phil Keogan had used in The Amazing Race.

The Petronas Towers were completed in 1996 and are the world's tallest towers. They are not just a "showpiece of distinction" but also a world renowned center for "business, science, technology and the arts." They really are a symbol of Malaysia's economic prosperity, and that is one thing I will not mock. But the people behind Petronas take themselves pretty serioualy. With a background of excitin music, I managed to scribble down these notes of useless stats or useless features of the facility:

*onsite Petroleum Resource Center (probably of interest only to my friend Alex Noel (pronounced Knoll) Pascarella who had her business card read "A. Noel, Lubes and Petroluems.")
*Central Fire Command, outfitted with sophisticated 24 hour fire response technology
*the geometric shape of the foundation, symbolic in the Islam faith
*88 floors
*5400 parking spots
*10 elevators per building
*amount of stainless steel used to form the "silvet satin ribbons"
*amount of concrete used, includin broken down into entire structure and just foundation

After the 8 minute video, we were herded up to the 41st floor skybridge between the towers for 10 minutes of picture taking. Wait, arent there 88 floors? The Phillipino girls and I felt cheated, but that didnt stop us from "angling" (philipino slang, don't ask...) for the entire 10 minutes allocated. Don't believe me? Then check ouy how many photo's I've been tagged in from these snap happy ladies on facebook.

Carol and I waited almost 4 hours for the crappy view and self-important video. But then again, Petronas probably should be pretty arrogant because they have schmucks like us lined up every day.