moving on

Kuala Lumpur wears out rather quickly, to be honest.  It has an aspect a bit like Las Vegas, in a way – everything brand new, a great deal of concern about being the biggest (world’s tallest flagpole, [formerly] tallest buildings, world’s largest free-flight aviary, etc.), and everything hinting at being an imitation of something else.  Lots of effort into making truly gargantuan malls and shopping zones, yet the streets run like rivers with every afternoon’s tropical thunderstorm.  And let me tell you, the sight of thousands of rats evacuating the sewers in unison when the thunder starts pealing out is a litle unsettling.

However it’s good spot to shop for all the things that didn’t turn up in a last-minute frantic packing job.  The food is great and cheap, and sitting at the base of the Petronas Towers is truly humbling.  The brain cannot comprehend the scale of them, and there’s something about the powerful spotlights illuminating the low-hanging clouds that exaggerates that even further.

So now I’m in Georgetown, on Penang Island in the north of peninsular Malaysia.  It’s an old British colony town, filled with the crumbling mansions of eighteenth-century Chinese shipping magnates.  In the town’s Little India tonight (every Malaysian town has one, settled by South Indian Muslims fleeing various pogroms) I recorded the most amazing mashup of Indian classical music, Malay pop, and Bollywood musicals blasting from half a dozen competing CD/DVD stores on the same corner (all bootlegs, of course – apparently Malaysia is the world’s copyright piracy capital).

The photography has gone well, despite torrential rain every afternoon.  However posting photos remains a problem – if anyone can suggest a blog that will let me upload pictures in batches (this wordpress blog can only upload one at a time, which is simply not going to work), resize automatically and restrict the expanded-view size to considerably less that original full size, then I’ll move this over…  As it is, the only option I see is to upload to a dedicated photo site, edit the photos there, then cut and paste image links over here.  That’s a little more fussy than I’d like, given the infrequency of my internet usage over here.  We’ll see.