Another new home

Every single year since graduating high school I’ve moved residences…at first within the Midwest, then to Texas, and now all the way across the ocean to Kuala Lumpur. I am super excited to be here – definitely appreciative of the opportunity – but also nervous about learning my new job, maintaining work life balance, keeping in contact with people in the US, making new friends, & prepping for grad school, all while exploring KL and the whole rest of SE Asia. To be able to accomplish all of that seems overwhelming – but day by day I think it will feel more in reach.

So here’s what this new home looks like!

My apartment

TI is putting us up in Somerset Ampang, basically an extended stay hotel. The residences are like apartments but in a hotel atmosphere. I’ll let the pics speak for themselves, hah!

View from my place on the 19th floor

Nice tub view too 😀

Kitchenette

Bed that could fit 4 of me

Living area

I’m not a pool person but I think I just became one

Overall it’s super nice – there’s breakfast in the mornings and a restaurant next door, & it’s walking distance to a grocery store & mall. It’s a bit far from the ‘going out’ area (Bukit Bintang), so that may get annoying, and I don’t yet know how the commute will be, so I’ll refrain from complaining yet 😛

KLCC

I did a little bit of exploring this weekend with some of the other TI people living at Somerset. We walked around a bit at KLCC (KL City Center), went to the big mall there, the park, saw the iconic Petronas Towers (I mean, you can see them from basically everywhere), went grocery shopping, and went to the aquarium. KLCC is very modern and basically like the US, if you ignore the Malay signs, motorbikes, palm trees, and driving on the left side of the road (…ok, maybe not just like the US).

Petronas Towers!

Cutie lobster at the Aquaria

Also picked up some dragon fruit when we went grocery shopping 🙂

Bukit Bintang

This is an area with street food, bars, restaurants, and lots of expats. Saturday night we went to a bar called Taps, which had craft beer. Alcohol in Malaysia is expensive (taxes + it’s a Muslim country) – but by expensive, I mean about the same price as in the US. Just relative to everything else, it’s expensive. Anyway, after we had our fill of the super Western craft beer bar, we explored the area. This is when I couldn’t stop smiling – finally we found the street food (a busy street called Jalan Alor) and the SE Asia character that I grew to love last summer. The next day we came back to the area to eat lunch at Jalan Alor, which was much more bustling the previous night, but we still managed to find great food there for lunch. An example of how cheap it is – we had 3 dishes and 4 drinks (not alcoholic), which came out to around RM55 or 60 – aka $14 😀

There are a ridiculous amount of malls in KL

Giant dumplings on Jalan Alor

My lunch – I think it was called Yuan Yan on the menu. But I googled that and nothing comes up…

Lychee mojitos that tasted like they had next to no alcohol -_-

My frenemy, the durian

Besides exploring a bit, I’ve been organizing my stuff, and now trip planning – apparently during my second week of work, there are 2 national holidays, so 2 days off. Surprisingly, this is more stressful than anything – the number of possibilities of places to go to is just so huge that I’ve had trouble deciding. But I think I’ve settled on a couple places to travel to next week…I’ll keep you posted 🙂