Despite having already spent nearly a week in Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur back in April, I came back for two days to play tourist again. As I covered most of what there is to see on my last visit, I worked on the few gaps I had left for various reasons.
First of all, the National Palace (Istana Negara): I wanted to visit this place already back in April and even took a ride there via the Grab app, but for some unknown reason my driver dropped me off at the employee entrance, about 3 km away from the general public viewpoint at the main gate. I was so fed up with that situation, that I just said screw it, I won’t see the place then. So this time, I carefully triple-checked the app for the right location and was successful. Just a few words about the palace: It was built in 2011 and replaced the former palace. It cost a staggering 812.000.000 MYR which is around 170 Mio. € at the current exchange rate (inflation not accounted for). Apparently the old one was too small, so they needed something more sparkly and shiny.
Another big area I couldn’t see last time were the botanical gardens. At first I was surprised that there was no entrance fee, especially as Malaysians just like to double the fee for people with my white foreigner face (and all other foreigners in general), but once inside, if you want to visit the different attractions inside, they at last remembered to steal the foreigner’s money (Bird Park, Butterfly Pavilion, …). My funniest experience in regards to the Botanical Gardens: I arrived by train and the station is just 200 m away from the park, but unfortunately there is barely a good way to get there as there is a row of skyscrapers, 30 m altitude difference and a highway in your way. I remembered that last time I found a way, but you had to pay for that way as it was basically entering and leaving a MRT Metro station (kind of stupid). So I wanted to look for another way and actually found one that lead me through a skyscraper down into the parking area that left the building at the other side down on the lower level I needed. As I wasn’t in a rush I made it a challenge for myself to try that and succeeded.
My third day in KL was of different nature: I introduced myself to the German School of Kuala Lumpur to see if they need a person like me and I also wanted to see what the school there is like. What surprised me were the problems the school is facing because they are basically the exact same ones like in Kyiv. Nearly all except for one: They definitely struggle less with non-German speakers as the Malaysian government is a lot more restrictive in regards to allow national students visiting International Schools, so they have barely any Malaysian students. Will this be my future employer? Who knows. They only had their first day of the year, so they of course still can’t predict who will be with them by the end of the year. It’ll show.
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