Hey mate, you want movies?

Petaling Street (Where we are staying)

The Petronas Towers (taken from the KL Tower) Just about to climb a lot of steps Who looks more stylish? Chow Kit Market It's a rude word tee hee hee

Selamat from Malaysia! (That's hello just incase your Malaysian isn't what it should be). Firstly, I have to treat you to a brief but brilliant Malaysian history lesson, something I discovered at the National History Museum on Tuesday. About 500 years ago, Malaysia was called the Malaysian Empire. Before that it was called Malacca. The name Malacca came from an incident in which the first Prince of the region, Paremeswara was resting under a Melaka tree watching his dog play. Sitting there, Paremeswara saw his dog get kicked into a stream by a mouse deer. Taking this as a good omen, he decided to name his new country after the tree he was sat under. In the museum, there was also a painting to illustrate this. It was, as you might guess, a painting of a man watching his dog get hoofed into a stream by a deer.

Isn't history fun? Anyway, Kuala Lumpur is a pretty interesting city, while it's the capital city of Malaysia, it is still growing and so in the centre there are a lot of big, flashy buildings but there are also a lot of cranes and half built structures. There is also a pretty vast difference between the city centre, where the Petronas Towers stand, and many of it's surrounding areas, in that you can see where most of the money goes.

The food here is brilliant and we are currently eating like kings but for ridiculously cheap prices. Within 2 minutes of where we are staying (Petaling Street, Chinatown) you can try mucho tasty Malaysian, Chinese or Indian food. The other day we both had bowls of a salty soup called Pan Mee, filled with stuff i couldn't even identify but it was damn tasty.

Our hotel is surrounded by markets, each time we leave everyone wants to sell us DVD's or watches. I wonder whether all the market vendors speak fluent english or whether they just learn a stock of phrases like "Hey handsome man, you want movies? Action... comedy... pornography?" Maybe I'll never know...

The best market we've been to so far is Chow Kit. We trekked there in the hope that it sold animal brains, Nick had read this somewhere. Alas, no brains were to be found but they did sell fish so fresh that it was still wriggling about. The market was a labyrinth of stalls, my sense of direction gave up on me pretty quickly and I just followed Nick on our search for brains. In fact, it is a good job that one of us can navigate as I generally like to wander in the vague direction of a place whereas Nick will actually look at a map. We get to destinations a lot quicker that way.

The picture with both of us in was taken just before we climbed the 272 steps to the Batu Caves, a kind of hollowed out limestone cliff/hindu temple. Here we were asked to be in the family snapshots of an Indian family. I initially thought that they just wanted me to take their picture but then the kids and the mother crowded round me and Nick and we waved and smiled. Maybe it was because we looked like pasty giants compared to them?

We've been doing a hell of a lot of walking about, yesterday we went to KL Tower and probably clocked up 10-12 km over the course of the day. As you might expect, I was knackered. But walking to places is the best way to see a city as a whole, had we taken buses everywhere we might never have seen the BUM equipment sign (hee hee hee) or the stylish man carrying the steering wheel of a boat. All worthwhile, I think you'll agree.

So, with all this walking about seeing stuff, we're obviously going to need a rest soon. Which is why we plan to spend a lot of time in Perth lazing around on a beach, maybe making the occasional effort to learn to surf.

Oh yeah, and the other night we accidentally walked along what, with hindsight, was probably a gay cruising spot. When I say with hindsight, it perhaps didn't need a great deal of hindsight when men are whistling at you and making cat noises in your direction. Hmmm.