Breakfast this morning at the hotel was quite disappointing after enjoying the Pan Pacific breakfast for the last 4 days.  What made it even worse was that there was no bacon with my eggs. I did find KL a bit of a strange place to visit.  Maybe it was the Koran next to my bed (first time I have stayed in a hotel with that) or the arrow on the bedside table pointing toward Mecca or the prayer mat next to my bed that did it. But it was probably more around how the people treated each other. There is a distinct class or social difference and I could see it easily.  I asked Frank (who is from Singapore) about it and he said that there is a class divide in Malaysia. It seems that the Malays get the better jobs.

The climate is as hot and humid as Singapore (the locals told me it is hotter than Singapore generally). Lots of palm trees. But there is also a mixture of glitzy wealth (like modern high rise buildings like the Petronas Twin Towers which used to be the tallest buildings in the world) but then there are unfinished high rise builders with what looks like squatters in them. The photo was from my hotel room and the one building was a modern office block and the other was an unfinished building with people’s washing hanging in the gaps in places.

I am definitely getting a bit more into toilet humor I think.  After the squatting toilet from yesterday I had the picture on the left on my toilet in my hotel room. It was a ‘Eco washer’ toilet.  Couldn’t bring myself to try it out but it seemed to be a built in bidet on the toilet. Where do people think of these things? Probably while sitting on the loo.

I had a client presentation and lunch to do. The people who attended seemed to quite engaged and while they didn’t ask questions immediately after I was finished, there was a lot of discussion around the presentation at the table over lunch.  In fact, the whole of lunch was a discussion around the presentation and Frank said the same thing happened at the table he was at. So I take that it means it went down well. I did find it kind of strange that at lunch the attendees would just dismiss the waiters and waitresses. For example, they would come and offer tea/coffee and the guy would just ignore them (like he was making a point) and then after a minute or so of them waitng patiently he would just waive his hand as if to say get away.  Very dismissive and again strengthening my view on the class thing.

After lunch it was back to the airport. This time we took a taxi back. Taxi’s in KL also come in different classes (see what I mean about class distinction). You can get a budget taxi (red, beaten up old Corolla) or a luxury taxi (blue, new Toyota MPV) or an executive one (Merc or BMW). Obviously priced appropriately. We took the Blue one. It takes about an hour by car back to the airport and that was without much traffic.  With traffic I was warned it could take 2-3 hours. Fortunately we got the shorter version today. Not sure why there is so much traffic or why they put the airport that far away. There are just over 1m people living in KL and so it isn’t that big a city to warrant the airport being so far away or that much traffic.

Everything went smoothly at the airport and the plane (Cathay Pacific again which is a pity because their air hostesses don’t rival Singapore Airlines) left exactly on time and landed 15 minutes early in Hong Kong. It was a 3 hour 30 minute flight and I managed to watch World War Z, have dinner (yes Bryan eating again) and watch another episode of Luther (the BBC series). They even served Haagen Dazs ice cream again. For once arriving in HK was a breeze (no lines at all at immigration and in past trips I have queued for an hour at least). Our man in HK told me to take the train but I could really not be bothered at 10pm in the evening taking a train and then a taxi so I just took a taxi to the hotel. I am staying in downtown HK in a very modern/new hotel called Hotel Indigo.  It is listed as a Boutique hotel. It has 26 floors. Their idea of boutique is different from mine. It is nice and modern though and it has a Nespresso machine in the room so I am happy! It is also now 11:59pm and I need to go to bed now as I am pretty tired.