Petronas Towers and Upscale Malls - Tomorrow Phuket

We started off our day with breakfast at the Somerset Hotel where the Chesnuts stayed when they first got here for almost 4 weeks while they were waiting for their house to get done.  The G-Kids especially like the breakfast buffet and Raz, one of the waiters who they became very friendly with.  He came over to talk with us several times and seemed genuinely glad to see the family.

We then went to the Petronas Towers about 8 blocks away which at one time were the tallest buildings in the world, although they've now been surpassed by a building in, I think, Qatar.  In 1999, Sean Connery and Katherine Zeta-Jones filmed "Entrapment", a caper movie where the building was prominently featured.

We were going to get tickets to go to the top and go across the bridge between the two towers but the line was very long and when we found out that the earliest we could actually go up the towers was after 6 p.m. we decided not to get the tickets.  Waiting in the line until we found this out was still interesting given the mix of people in line.  The range went from German tourists wearing shorts, as were we, to local Muslim women wearing head scarves and several wearing Burkhas.  So far I've never seen a woman wearing a Burkha without being with one or more other women also wearing them or being with a man whom I'm presuming was her husband.

Then we left Petronas Towers to go to a park across the street where the kids played when they stayed downtown.  On the way there, a group of  Malays family stopped us and one of the men held out a camera to me and I thought he wanted me to take a picture of them but they then motioned the rest of our family to be in their picture.  So I wound up taking a group picture of our family with their group together even though we had never seen them before.  A couple of minutes after that several other locals just casually walked up and touched the hair of our blonde girls while smiling.  The girls didn't think anything of it because it happens to them all the time.  The racial and social class dynamics of the country are something I'll do a separate post on at some time.

Here are some pictures of the kids playing in the park:

After the playground it was time for lunch and Amy and Justin knew this really great Chinese dim sum restaurant that was in one of the very upscale downtown malls several blocks away so we walked over there and fortunately were able to walk most of the way through an extensive skyway system that was mostly air-conditioned.  That was very welcome by then because did I mention before in earlier posts to this blog that it is steaming HOT, HOT, HOT here!?!? My shirt was very sweat-stained so we'll just skip those pictures here.

The dim sum was the best I've ever had and at the entrance to the restaurant there were windows so you could watch the guys making and steaming the dumplings.

Then we walked through the very high end mall back where the car was parked.  At one place there was a fashion show going on.

Quite a contrast from the restaurant we went to last night where Justin warned us about the feral cats and the possibility of rats.  Tonight we're going to eat at La Mexicana, a high-end restaurant owned by the woman who is the head chef at the Mexican Embassy.

Tomorrow we're catching an early flight to Phuket, Thailand where we'll stay at a beach resort for 4 days.