Commuting and Batu Caves

It's day 3 in KL, Malaysia. We're slowly adjusting to the time change, the climate, the people, the culture and the smells. Following are some details of what i've been up to.


Our professor took me and the other student working at the same place as I on a trip to find out how to get to our workplace. We went at night because we were the only group left and we had made plans for the next day already. To get to work, I have to walk about 10 minutes to the commuter train. Then I have to buy a pass (1.10 ringets= <$0.40). They have special train cars just for women so I'll be taking that train to avoid creepy guys :D. I take the train for three stops and then have to walk about 15 minutes to my office. The walk is along a major highway and through a chinese neigborhood in the city. At some spots I had to speed up my pace because I don't trust some of the people around me. Hopefully it won't be as scary when I go during the day. 


I got back to the apartment after 9 at night, showered and went to bed and fell asleep instantly. 


Today most of us in the apartment woke up early due to the jetlag. We made our breakfasts and met the rest of the group at 10 in the lobby to go to the Batu Caves. We took the commuter train and got out at the caves. Following are some pictures of the day...

This is me in front of a large statue at the entrance of the Batu Caves. Here you can also see the 272 steps that we had to climb to get into the caves. At this point it was raining so the we were soaked and the steps were very slippery. 

This is inside the cave. There were a lot of shrines in the cave and a lot of vendors trying to sell us souvenirs. At the top you can see the trees and an opening in the cave. The smells were also very interesting as they were burning a lot of incense and there were lots of different animals living there.

While the rest of the group went into the dark cave and took a 45 minute tour to see large spiders and bats (I wasn't jumping to see this), a few of us stayed back and got henna drawings on our hands. This is the one I got. The girl that did the drawing was so fast and it was super cheap too! It's supposed to stay on for two weeks.

After waling around in the caves and exploring some of the other vendors around this area, Andrea took us to this really good indian restaurant that we HAD to try. First of all, the Indian people eat with their right hand and use their left hand for going to the bathroom. They also walked around of bare feet and the floors were very dirty. We decided to eat with a fork instead.

This is where we ate lunch- a very Indian eatery

This is my banana leaf. It had a variety of "salad" type things at the top (the one on the right was marinated onion and cucumber, then a squash type potato salad, then some jalapeno salad  and then something else) something that tasted like potato chips on the bottom left and some plain rice. Below are the sauces that I could put on the rice. They were curry, a coconut sauce, a tomato sauce, and some other that I couldn't identify.

It looks a bit messy and it was. They don't really clean well but the quality of the food was still really good.

After this delicious but very interesting lunch, we took the commuter train back to Putra station and had to go to the mall to take passport pictures for our visas. I got some groceries for breakfast and now we're chilling in our room. We'll go get some supper soon, watch a movie an get a good night sleep since tomorrow is our fist day of work! This will be exciting but also scary since we don't know what to expect or what we have to do.