Chinatown and Fireflies

Today, I wandered around Chinatown a little too early in the morning. I'm still in the mindset where it takes an hour to do anything (i.e leaving your village) so I overestimate the time it takes to do things or go places. With the efficient public transportation in KL, I can arrive at my destination in 15 minutes, leaving me puzzled and wandering aimlessly until things start opening up.

Entrance to Petaling St - The giant flat screen makes it seem like Chinatown from the future.

Petaling Street in Chinatown is famous for its counterfeit everything: purses, clothing, shoes, DVDs. I guess the law takes a lax attitude towards copyright infringement as I spotted a few officers also browsing the stalls for genuine imitations.
 

Random sites around Chinatown

Sort of on impulse I decided to join a tour group to check out the firefly colony in Kuala Selangor. The trip itself kinda sucked but I'm glad I tried it anyway.

Mangrove forest and the Straits of Malacca

British lighthouse

Mangrove forest

Mother and child monkeys

These monkeys hang out in Melawati Hill and have become so dependent on humans for their food because of so much exposure to tourists. Our tour guide, a pretty responsible fellow, basically forbid us from feeding the monkeys.

The cute baby monkeys are golden when they're young.

literal street bums

Much to the dismay of the Europeans in my group, we were brought to a fish market. At this point, I really wanted to take a picture of their faces rather than the dried anchovies.

Dinner

And it tasted good, too.

We had dinner at a riverside seafood restaurant where our tour guide and I compared our Asian heritages (me: Filipino; him: Chinese, Thai, Korean and Japanese) and I tried to explain why I don't have an accent. (This seems to be a really difficult concept to explain.) Anyway, the guy was pretty excited when he learned of my background. I guess there is sort of an affinity between Filipinos and Malaysians as he cried out "Kababayan!" Then we compared my vocabulary of Arabic and my even more limited vocabulary of Tagalog to find shared words in the Malay language.

I also tried 'todee' (palm wine). That and a hot and stifling life jacket do not go together on a boat trip.

Despite it being a firefly tour, the monkeys and the food were the highlights of the trip. The fireflies were pretty cool but it would be pretty impossible to capture it on camera (basically, imagine lots and lots of tiny Christmas lights). I probably won't do an organized tour again. I enjoy myself a lot more wandering the streets aimlessly watching shopkeepers prepare for business than being dragged along with a random group of strangers but I'm glad I tried it anyway.