Malaysia: My Selangor Story 2013 (06) - KLCC & Petaling Street

We arrived at Arenaa Star Luxury Hotel in Kuala Lumpur at around 6.30 p.m. After check-in there’s a briefing on AstuteXperience, a relatively new lifestyle/ holiday membership programme.

AstuteXperience membership fee is USD150 (~ MYR450) per annum and for that, you’d get access to discounted rates and prices at plenty of hotels and dining establishments throughout the region. Their membership pack alone already contains 5 getaway vouchers which easily would have covered the cost of the membership fee. The good thing is that the list of establishments to be covered by the card is expanding by the day to include among others, beauty, health & spa centres as well as theme parks like Sunway Lagoon.

With them being one of the sponsors for My Selangor Story 2013, all of us got a membership card and pack each for free! YESSS!!! :-) Thank you, guys. In fact, if it were not for AstuteXperience, we probably wouldn't have managed to stay at two of the newest and coolest 4-star hotels in Kuala Lumpur, namely Arenaa Star Luxury Hotel and Vivatel (where the group stayed at for our last night of the programme). These hotels are two of their many partner hotels. I will definitely come back and update more after I have started using the card, which somehow has ended up with someone else in Aceh, Indonesia. But then that’s another story for another day. :-)

After the briefing, we were brought around the hotel to check out some of the rooms and restaurant. After that we went out for a quick dinner around the corner before heading out to Chinatown in Petaling Street. A quick dinner turned out to be not so quick after some mixed up in the meals ordered. We left the restaurant at almost 10 p.m.

While having dinner I found out that some of us in the group wanted to go to KLCC instead of Chinatown. Seeing none in this group are from Malaysia, I told Safri, the group tour guide, that I’d be tagging along with 7 others to KLCC while the rest of the group headed to Chinatown with Safri.

Right after dinner Beni, Citra, Husni, Intan, Kasri, Syauqie and Winny followed me to Masjid Jamek Station from where we took Kelana Jaya LRT Line to KLCC Station. Remembering the “events” earlier in the morning during Klang Heritage Walk, I was on the lookout for Citra every few minutes, ha ha! (Sorry, Citra, I just wanted to make sure you didn’t get lost, heh!) In less than 10 minutes we were already standing outside Petronas Twin Towers and started snapping away photos of the beautiful towers.

Sorry for the distortion, guys! It was my first time playing around with a wide angle lens! :-(
At least you guys look taller in the photo, heh heh! ;-)

After we were done with the Twin Towers we took the LRT back to Masjid Jamek and walked to Chinatown instead of going back direct to the hotel. Most of the stalls were already closed by the time we got there at around 11.30 p.m. although the lanterns were still lit up and some restaurants still had some patrons.

The lights and lanterns were all beautiful but I seriously wish something could be done about all the garbage strewn around the area. It’s just embarrassing. Okay, just forget about what tourists should see or not see because Malaysians deserve and can certainly do better too.

As the saying goes, when there’s a will, there’s a way. There’s definitely a way or two but I wonder where’s the will?

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For more information on AstuteXperience, check out their homepage: http://www.astutexperience.com/ or their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/AstuteXperience

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