Here are a few pictures I took in KL city.
First, in the Pavilion shopping mall in Bukit Bintang. This was just a few minutes walk from my hotel, in the midst of some very busy streets. It’s a very high-end mall: lots of the top names (e.g. Prada, Cartier, Rolex) have stores there. So do some other names that don’t seem quite so high-end: Dorothy Perkins (!) and T. M Lewin (!!). But maybe those brands seem more exotic from the perspective of Asia.
I also did a hop-on/hop-off bus ride and here are a few from that:
The National Palace is where Malaysia’s Head of State resides. Malaysia has a totally unique constitutional model – an elected constitutional monarch. It all goes back to the situation at the time Malaysia independence in 1957. At that time the Federation of Malaya consisted of two British colonies (Penang and Malacca) and nine Sultanates. In 1957 they decided to adopt something quite like the British model and have constitutional monarchy but with the government being drawn from members of parliament. But who should become the monarch? There had always been nine Sultanates; some bigger, some smaller, but all theoretically equal in status. So they decided to rank the Sultans in terms of seniority (length of time as Sultan); then the most senior Sultan at the time of independence would become the King (and head of state) for a term of five years. At the end of that time the first King would be followed by the current Sultan of the next Sultanate, in terms fo the 1957 seniority list. However, although everyone knows who the next King will be, they go through a form of election: the nine Sultans vote for next King, it’s just that the ballot paper only has one name on it, that of the agreed Sultan! I have to say that however strange it seems, it has served them well ever since 1957.
And finally a few images from a visit I made to the National Museum. I didn’t go in, just took some pictures of the exterior of the whole museum, and of the interior of a “Village Chief’s House” that has been erected in the grounds.
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