KL is KooL

Not often to I get to check a new country off the travel list these days, but I did these past few days during a quick trip to Asia. And it is a Quick trip with a capital Q. I’ll spend more time in an airplane each way than I will actually working. In fact, I think the 15.5 hour flight from DFW to Hong Kong is one of the longest I’ve been on. Fortunately, it was on one of American’s newer 777s, which is not nearly as bad in coach as some of the alternatives. I was also fortunate to get in the Main Cabin Extra section which has wider seats and far more leg room than the rest of coach. It also has the new entertainment system which helped the time pass by more quickly since I didn’t sleep that well on the plane.

In the end, it took nearly 28 hours of total travel time to get from my door to the Kuala Lumpur Hilton. So when my head hit the pillow at 2AM, needless to say, I was beat. I’m certainly glad I flew in a day in advance because needing to get up and go to a client site 6 hours later would have been brutal. Instead, I had a relatively leisurely Sunday to readjust to the time zone I left just three weeks ago.

Upon waking up and heading downstairs, the breakfast at the hotel was one of the best that I can remember. It was one of the fullest buffets I’ve seen anywhere, and all of the food I tried was delicious. Though certainly not typical breakfast food for me, I tried some of the red curry, and had to go back for seconds it was so good. They also had an assortment of lassi’s and a made to order juice bar, which both were quite good as well. I don’t know that I have ever seen beef bacon, so of course I needed to try it. Think of a cross between regular bacon and beef jerky; kind of hard to mess up salty, slightly fatty meat — and they didn’t!

 After I was fully stuffed, I decided to venture out into the world for a bit. One of my local friends/coworkers, Desmond, gave me some recommendations on some things to see, so I tried to knock off a few of the things on that list.

On the top of the list was a visit to KLCC (Kuala Lumpur City Center), home to what was once the tallest buildings in the world, the Patronas towers. You might recognize the iconic sky bridge from several movies. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective), they only allow a few people to go up to the bridge at a time. This means that while you’re up there, you aren’t fighting with people for a view — so I hear. The downside to only letting a few people up there was that tickets were sold out, and I didn’t get a chance to go check it out myself.

 Instead, I quickly walked through the mall to get out to the KLCC park where I had a chance to walk around a bit and get some fresh air and exercise. This park was pretty small, so after a loop around, I decided to find something else to see. I saw some bars / restaurants that looked interesting that were pretty close, so I walked down to see them, only to realize shortly after that I was still stuffed from breakfast.

I continued my walk down to one of the other areas on Desmond’s list — Chinatown. I looked at reviews for a few of the different shopping streets and settled in on the one that sounded closest to a street market. Perhaps, it was an unfair comparison since I was so recently in China, but I was a little underwhelmed — and therefore, didn’t buy anything.

It was also starting to get a bit later, and I was pretty tired, so I went back to the hotel to review my material for Monday.

I capped off the night with dinner and drinks in the exec lounge which was very nice as well. I’ve been very impressed with the hotel overall. I enjoyed reading more of the book I started over some Shiraz and Manchego cheese before heading back to my room to call it a night.

Monday in KL has gone by pretty quickly. After another delicious breakfast, I made my way over to the client site to try to figure out where I needed to go. I got there with plenty of time to spare, but it was a little frustrating that the local account team didn’t plan out the visit logistics better. For example, I didn’t get the address of the building until 8AM, and no one from the account team was there to meet me initially prior to the meeting.

That all being said, the meeting itself went well. We clearly identified some issues and what needed to be done to establish a path forward for them — which I certainly hope will happen. As it stands, their developers aren’t quite seeing the light yet, but the management has the right vision in place.

After a quick debrief it was time to head to the airport to catch a plane to Singapore. Before we left, I did manage to make a new friend who turned out to be on the same flight, so he and I had a bit of a chat to kill some time. Sharif is apparently an actor in Bangladesh… You never know who you’ll meet!

I’ll likely catch up with Brian when I get to Singapore before we get our Design Thinking workshop kicked off tomorrow and Wednesday, but that’s a topic for another post.