Smell of hell and taste of heaven ! I love to tell my travels and anecdotes on the internet during my trips to the other side of the world. Despite the number of destinations and countries I have visited in the last two years, I still want to travel because there are still places I dream of discovering. Believing that if I do indeed exceed the speed of light, I could go back in time to have the strength and the means to make new journeys. I’m not talking about a trip to the next door, when I go to London it’s to visit my family, to Paris for a concert, to Berlin to see Angela, or any other European country. You’ve probably been there before and know how it goes. Nothing changes compared to France. Despite my age I’m very curious, like a kid, unfortunately my curiosity is limited by my salary which is that of a simple employee. I will eventually be able to wake your curiosity, why not by showing you my travel pictures, making you want to go and visit these countries where people live almost naked on the beaches. For this I just want those who are like me, who thought they had a lot of time, to realize that the theory of general relativity is only a mathematical formula and that we cannot go back in time. So I allow myself to share my experience, also so that it will serve me later to remember. One day, when I will be retired (now I’m talking like an old man), I won’t be able to afford anything anymore. Then I will be able to remember beautiful moments of my life. The reforms of our dear and young president (I still speak like an old man), who loves active employees, gives them bonuses to encourage them to continue working. That’s good, but those who have worked all their lives and have to stop at some point, or those who can no longer work because they have done a difficult job and have been broken by the difficulty of their work, those are the ones. He doesn’t want them, they cost him a lot of money. I just want to remind our dear chairman that we have made children. It is they who will pay for our pensions, just as we who worked to pay for the pensions of our forefathers. In short, believe me, it is better to talk about travel than about macronism, it is much more pleasant. Macron, like all these bosses, cuts off my appetite by their blinded greed, and by profit, they forget the essential and the human.So I left at the beginning of November for ten days in Malaysia, in Kuala Lumpur, the capital. There’s not much to tell, everything was perfect. The people, the landscapes, the food and even the climate. Like many South East Asian countries, they have only one season, the good Lord has spoiled them, an eternal and unique summer season. We left during the monsoon season. Before I left I thought it was going to rain all the time in Kuala Lumpur, whether it was a stroke of luck or a climatic disturbance, it rained only once every two days, for an hour or two. After the rain, a sunburn to put things back in order and here we go again at thirty or thirty five degrees Celsius, while at home it was snowing, lucky bastards. When we arrived in KL and until the end of our stay, my wife and I were humming Charles Aznavour’s song, “Towards the docks where weight and boredom bend my back, they come with a belly full of fruit and boats, dragging a peppery perfume of unknown countries and eternal summers where we live almost naked on the beaches, take me to the end of the earth, take me to wonderland, it seems to me that misery would be less painful in the sun”. Well, people in KL don’t know much about poverty, it’s true there’s a lot of money circulating and it shows, it’s an oil-rich country. The Petronas twin towers are a perfect example of what the petrodollar can do. Inside these two buildings, there are only offices where ninety thousand people work every day, and it is also the headquarters of the Malaysian national oil company. To facilitate communication between the two buildings, there is a suspension bridge that connects them to the fifty-fourth floors, and it is an architectural masterpiece. In Kuala Lumpur people build from everywhere. The Malaysians are also building against the clock and I don’t know why. Do they, like me, want to make up for lost time? People work seven days a week, thirty days a month and three hundred and sixty five days a year. I understand that we shouldn’t talk like that about work in France, in fact, we shouldn’t say that people work sixteen hours a day, it might shock a lot of my compatriots because it’s a great sin. Personally, I think that we should leave the choice to the people, the freedom to work or not to work on Sundays is a personal decision and not a collective one, all the more so as it would allow people to earn a better living. Secularism is also a sensitive issue in France, Malaysia is a secular country but secularism has a real meaning, hence their slogan, “Harmony in diversity”. There are various communities in Malaysia, there are Chinese who are Buddhists, there are Malaysians who are mostly Muslims, and there are also Indians, but there, I don’t know their religions. There are many of the religions in India, but I am completely ignorant of them. All these ethnic groups live and work, live and die in the same country, without one pointing a finger at the other. They dress differently, eat differently, and pray differently without offending each other. For me it makes sense, and I completely adhere to their secularism.
The food is cheap, very varied and well spiced, I don’t have many mythical places to suggest you to visit Kuala Lumpur, once you have visited the parliament house, the petronas towers, the great mosque, and the Batu caves which is the largest Hindi shrine outside India, you will find a very large standing Buddha waving hello. Apart from that, you still have the shopping malls. Among them, there is one called Berjaya Time Square. A complex that includes a large five-star hotel, a leisure center, a thousand shops, restaurants and stores in which you can find cheap products, due to the local manufacture. The Berjaya Hotel, the one where we spent our stay, is not a bad hotel, but there is better. However, there is a sky-train station right in front of the hotel door, just like in Bangkok. Concerning the hotel, you have to be careful because there are two types of rooms. The ones that are reserved for you when you buy your stay cheaply on the internet, and there is the one that you pay full price for. But still, after twenty hours of traveling, including five hours in transit in Amsterdam, we arrived tired and we had only one desire, to rest. They wanted to give us a room that we were obliged to refuse. The faucet was leaking, the toilets were limestone, a small twenty-seven inch TV, the freezer in the small fridge looked like a block of ice and the room had completely dilapidated and dilapidated furniture. It was quite different from the pictures I had seen when I made the reservation, but in the end, thanks to my wife who didn’t want to accept the condition of the room, we managed to get the upgrade without paying any extra. So they changed us the room for another one that had nothing to do with the first one. What’s a shame about this whole thing is that if we hadn’t said anything, or rather… If my wife hadn’t had the reflex to refuse the room, we might have had a horrible time at KL. You always have to watch out for scams. As in many tourist countries, there are people for whom scamming is a profession, and KL is no exception. These are not local people, but rather people who landed there probably without papers for whom working legally is impossible. Or maybe it’s tourists who have made a bad choice in their lives to work less and earn more. Public transport is cheap, buses are free, the sky-train network is well developed but what is a pity is that sometimes you have to walk five hundred meters to change train lines. Cooking and food in KL is just to be dropped. But according to my wife, it’s not as good as in Bangkok. What smells like hell and tastes like heaven? It’s the Durian of course, but I could never describe it to you, you have to go there to taste it, and only then you’ll know why I’m addicted to it personally.
I’m going to leave you with a big hug.
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