Weekdays in Lembah Kelang

The family is off to KL for a few days. The intent is not to shop but to enjoy the culinaries on offer. It has been a while since we set our foot here. At KLIA, we noticed there was not a single foreign airline could be seen in this vast airport amongst the twenty or so MAS and Air Asia planes. May be it was not the peak time but then that is unlike any other international airports such as Singapore. For its size, KLIA failed to attract or retain many foreign carriers. The growth of passengers have only been fueled by the local carriers.

We were picked up and headed to Sri Hartamas, our base in the next few days. The motorways here are quite impressive, there's always new ones sprouting out here and there. These must be quite a heavy investment to the government but the return in terms of general convenience and helping the economy must have been many times. But then again KL is always clogged up with traffic. This city of two millions seems to have far too many cars, somewhat comparable to cities of 10 millions like Jakarta or Bangkok. I suppose this is due to poor public transport system. The LRT is not doing what it is suppose to do. And building more roads end up encouraging more car users - its a vicious circle.

Passing through the many large palm oil plantations, we started to talk about the high price of palm oil right now. Currently the price has dropped abit but is still about 3 to 4 times more than a couple of years ago. So much so that Felda and Sime Darby can afford to pay up to 2000 ringgits to the manual workers a month. So the aggro economy is a keystone economic sector to the country whilst it is moving to IT and high tech focus.

Our first food adventure was at Star Hill for a late dinner. The place is still full of Middle Easterners on holidays far away from Western Europe or the States where negative perceptions of Islam and Muslims are growing. The place looks weird though. Scantily clad ladies and fully covered Arab ladies walking pass each others. This year though some 300,000 Middle Easterners are swarming KL.