So Mom and I have done some damage. We decided that, since we have this vacation to ourselves for the first few days, we'd take advantage of the situation and shop just us girls.
Luckily KL is more than happy to accommmodate.
Yesterday evening we headed out the door to look for Jakel's, a famous fabric store, despite having only been here for a few hours and not having gotten much in the way of directions. But, as I mentioned, KL is more than happy to accommodate: Jakel's has a giant balloon with it's name and the word "sale" emblazoned boldly on both sides floating two storeys above the store. We hit up the silk section, joked around with the staff, and left with enough fabric to keep Mr. Alam the tailor busy for weeks.
Today, after being disappointed at the Petronas Twin Towers (more on that later), we taxied over to Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman to do some more exploring. Mom found a shoe store with a section that catered to women with larger feet (or men with large feet who dress as women, you decide), and after some hemming, some hawing, some water and some smarties, we made a few key purchases.
In both cases, Mom found the shop's only pregnant sales woman and paid for the unborn child's first year of life in commission.
The markets we explored this afternoon mainly sold the floral fabric Malay women wear. Most Malay women are Muslim and dress conservatively, long sleeves, long hemlines, and headscarves. Having grown up in a really waspy town in Central Ontario, I'm still not quite used to hijabs and headcoverings, so I was surprised to see row upon row of shops dedicated to designer headscarves where women could buy the newest designs from Turkey and Dubai.
Sixty percent of the Malaysian population is Malay; the other forty is made up of thirty percent Chinese and ten percent Indian. This last statistic explains the sari shops interspersed between the Malaysian florals, and why this afternoon you could have found me bopping along to Salam-e-Ishq as it blared out of a cd shop on the street. Oh, and since I've been here, I've had three random men smile and say "Hello Madame" for no reason. They've all been Indian. I'm beginning to believe that you can leave India, but India never truly leaves you.
This evening, however, a local woman showed us parts of the Chinese thirty percent that we likely never would have encountered without her help. Cheryl works at the Canadian High Commission here in KL; she's a tiny woman with a big smile, high cheekbones, and perfect posture, and, until 10pm at least, seemingly boundless energy. She took us into China Town a few metro stops from our hotel and my goodness this was the shopping I was looking for. Give me knock-offs. Give me oddities. Give me hot-off-the-back-of-the-truck export madness. We wandered the stalls, being hooted and hollered at and "Hello Madamed" for an hour and I bought nothing but some dried ginger and coconut. It was amazing. Now that I have a sense of the place I can go back and see if my Delhi-trained bargaining skills will work in KL. I've already discovered that the Indian nod I've whole-hearteldy adopted doesn't translate here. At all.
Then she took us for Chinese at a flourescent restaurant near Central Station. Despite being full from the half a bag of dried ginger I'd consumed in China Town, and the bowl of soya pudding she bought me, I stuffed myself silly on fried chicken, pork ribs, rice, and some tiny eight-legged seafood friends in a dish I can't name to save my life. She must think I'm crazy, going on and on about how much I love the food. Then again, she had us bring twenty pounds of food with us from Delhi, sweets and snacks she fell in love with while she was there but couldn't get here in Malaysia, so I suppose I must not seem that crazy afterall.
Food and shopping. That's pretty much all we've done so far. And so far I have to say, I'm really okay with it. I have some trips of the more cultural variety planned for tomorrow, but we'll have to see if Central Market doesn't distract me along the way.