Kino KL

Trav­el­ling to KL on a whim was always going to run the risk of us get­ting worked up over lit­tle things like traf­fic jams, pol­lu­tion, and won­der­ing what’s so dif­fer­ent about KL from Sin­ga­pore that we had to spend most of the week­end try­ing to get there.

But when you’re pre­pared for the traf­fic jams, half the bat­tle is almost won. I say almost because even after we thought we had got­ten over the worst of it get­ting into the city proper from the high­way, we go lost try­ing to locate the hotel I had picked, and I berated myself (for a short while only) for pick­ing a hotel we had never stayed at, nor dri­ven to.

Being pre­pared for KL to be a dan­ger­ous back­wa­ter as com­pared to cos­mopoli­tan and uniquely unique Sin­ga­pore, we were in for one of the bet­ter surprises.

One of the first stops we made was to that giant mall, Suria KLCC, on the fourth floor of which was the book­store Kinoku­niya. Even though you’d think that nowa­days, all malls around the world and their con­tents are the same, let us now tell you that Kino KL is way, way bet­ter than Kino Sin­ga­pore in terms of the num­ber of titles they carry in-store.

We bought a lot of books. So many that I am embar­rassed to tell you exactly how many we bought. Actu­ally, no. So many that I for­get, and I can’t be arsed to go to the book­shelf to count how many. The only time we paused from pil­ing books in our arms was to laugh for a long while when an announce­ment was heard on the store’s P.A. sys­tem that went some­thing like:

“Pag­ing for Mis­ter Adam, your girl­friend Kan Cheong is wait­ing for you at the entrance”.

I don’t know why we GEMS and other man­ner of rub­bish to improve cus­tomer ser­vice, when our expe­ri­ence in KL was won­der­ful with­out, as far as I know, sim­i­lar cam­paigns by the Malaysians. We were seri­ously impressed by the very help­ful secu­rity guard on a scooter who led our car all the way through the cav­ernous KLCC car park to the right exit which linked up to the hotel we were try­ing to get to, and with a smile.

Then again, it could have been that the secu­rity guard was seri­ously con­cerned that I was being a men­ace in the car park, going in cir­cles and at one point, block­ing the exit because I had for­got­ten to pay for the park­ing ticket, being so used to the ERP style car park fee deduc­tions that we con­ve­niently have here.

Naomi and I are now so enthused by KL that we’re quite keen on mak­ing reg­u­lar trips there. If not for Kinoku­niya, then for Nando’s, Dunkin’ Donuts and every other bas­tion of a civilised soci­ety that we don’t have the same of here.

iTunes is play­ing an ille­gal copy of When I Write The Book from the album “Labour Of Love — The Music of Nick Lowe” by Andrea Re of which I have the orig­i­nal CD.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Kinoku­niya, KL, Malaysia, Sin­ga­pore