This means I've slid into the zen of our stay in downtown Kuala Lumpur. We're here for the remainder of the Vancouver winter, so we are long-term tourists. We are living here as temporary residents, in truth. We don't have any necessary appointments to keep. Each morning, we can wake up and decide to do exactly as we wish.
Today, we conquered GoKL's purple-line bus. As mentioned a lot here lately, four free bus routes crisscross all the areas of downtown KL. They are used by those outside the core as an option to get to any specific point in the city. They are used by downtown residents to cut down on the necessity of taking a car. They make it easy for people like us a chance to discover the city.
Only the blue line runs by our apartment building, so we had to transfer to ride the purple loop. We did this at Bukit Bintang as we saw many free buses passing through the main shopping area earlier in the week. The purple loop didn't take long. We saw many parts of the city which we know in the 20-minute loop.
After going all the way around and returning to Bukit Bintang, I wanted to find a shopping mall that exclusively caters to electronic shops. There were five or six floors of outlets selling phones, cameras, and other gadgets. We didn't make it past the third before we realized we'd seen more than we needed to. I will have to research online first to get a handle the make and models first. I'd like to buy a cheap 2K Android tablet for photo-editing purposes. I'm not sure those two criteria, cheap and 2K, can be said in the same breath.
Finally, I am acquiring a pretty good idea of the layout of this city. Bukit Nanas (Pineapple Hill) is between us and the newer areas. Part of that hill has the KL Tower, but it also contains a natural jungle reserve!
This city is a perfect size with a population of approximately 1.73 million. It's not too big nor too small. Of course, the greater-KL area, called the Klang Valley, increases the population total by another 5.5 million. Except for a few planned trips though, we'll be staying pretty much near central Kuala Lumpur until mid-April.