Kuala Lumpur: Workdays, Weekends and a Taste of Home

May 16–23, 2023

Malaysia came into our travels at an interesting point. We had already travelled together to Thailand, and a couple of months earlier Singapore had turned an office trip into a holiday. Kuala Lumpur felt like a natural continuation of that rhythm — another work trip converted into personal travel, but this time Pragati and I travelled together from the very beginning.

The trip was meant to be a five-day visit to one of our office branches, where I had to spend time interacting with the team working under me. That meant the weekdays would inevitably revolve around work. But having Pragati with me changed what happened around those working hours. She would stay back during the day while I went to the office, and I would walk back to the hotel to take her out for lunch before returning to work. In the evenings, we would go out and see one thing at a time.

By the weekend, the rhythm changed completely. Saturday and Sunday were ours, and we could finally spend an entire day travelling instead of trying to fit a landmark into the few hours after work.

KL Sentral

We arrived in Kuala Lumpur in the evening on May 16. From the airport we took the train to KL Sentral, which turned out to be one of the best decisions of the trip without really being a decision at all. We were staying at Aloft Kuala Lumpur Sentral, right beside — almost above — the station.

The only problem was finding the entrance.

The hotel was so closely integrated with the station that getting to it involved a little asking around before we figured out that the entrance was actually accessible from inside the station itself. Once we found it, the location made perfect sense. My office was barely a three-minute walk away, and the railway connections meant that getting around Kuala Lumpur was remarkably convenient.

We had stayed at an Aloft in Delhi before, so the environment felt familiar. The Kuala Lumpur property had the same general feel, but it seemed cleaner and more polished to us. After checking in, though, we did not attempt any sightseeing. It was already evening, and the sensible thing was to find somewhere nearby for dinner and rest.

The next day the working holiday properly began.

One attraction at a time

The first few days were governed by the limitations of office life. There was no elaborate sightseeing plan. There was simply one attraction after another, fitted into the evening after work.

On May 17, we went to see the Petronas Twin Towers from outside. They are the sort of landmark that does not need much introduction. Seeing them in person, standing there beneath their unmistakable shape, was enough. But we would return to the towers later in the trip for a completely different experience.

The following evening took us to Central Market. It gave us a different side of Kuala Lumpur from the monumental towers — a place to wander, browse and take in the atmosphere without having to make the evening into a major expedition.

May 19 was for Bukit Bintang. This was where sightseeing and shopping naturally merged. The shops were impressive and seemed to have something for everyone. I remember looking at the electronics and thinking that I could probably live there indefinitely. Food and water would have been optional; the electronics section was enough.

Pragati found herself a nice leather handbag. I came away with a GoPro Hero 11, along with the usual collection of other shopping and souvenirs. It was one of those evenings where the attraction was not a single monument but the experience of being in a part of the city where there always seemed to be something to look at or buy.

But the most important discovery of those first few days was not a landmark at all.

The search for food

Food is always one of the practical questions that comes with international travel for us. Vegetarian food is not necessarily difficult everywhere, but finding food that feels familiar is another matter entirely.

As we usually do, I searched for Indian restaurants and found a Saravana Bhavan nearby. It sounded like the safe option. Unfortunately, the food was not up to the mark.

And then, almost by accident, we discovered Mr Naan & Mrs Idli.

That accidental discovery solved our food problem for the rest of the stay.

What made the place special was that we could get the kind of food we were comfortable with — including tawa phulka and typical North Indian food. For Pragati in particular, that was a welcome relief. Instead of wondering where our next vegetarian meal would come from, we had found a place we could simply return to.

And return we did.

It became our lunch-and-dinner place throughout our time in Kuala Lumpur. There is something comforting about finding a small piece of familiar food in an unfamiliar city, especially when you are travelling for work and the days already have enough uncertainty in them.

The meal also had a fitting ending: hot gulab jamun. A steaming gulab jamun after dinner became almost a ritual, and it was the perfect way to finish the day.

Sometimes a travel memory is not the famous attraction you came to see. Sometimes it is the restaurant you stumbled upon and then refused to leave.

Saturday: Batu Caves and Menara KL

Saturday, May 20, was different. There was no office waiting for me, so for the first time during the trip we had an entire day to ourselves.

We used the train again, this time to go to Batu Caves. Staying at KL Sentral made the journey particularly easy, and the fact that we could simply use the train was one of the things we appreciated about where we were staying.

It was our first visit to Batu Caves.

There is always a certain pride in seeing Indian temples outside India. Usually, however, there is also a familiar feeling that the temple somehow becomes a smaller version of what we know back home. Batu Caves was very different. It was huge.

The giant Murugan statue immediately establishes the scale of the place, while the colourful staircase leading upwards becomes an attraction in itself. The climb is tiring — especially when you are determined to go all the way up — but neither of us would have considered stopping halfway. Once we reached the top, the views and the cave itself made the effort worthwhile.

Inside the cave, the scale and atmosphere were mesmerizing. And there was another small detail that made the experience unexpectedly familiar. We could see many South Indians, particularly Tamils, visiting the temple. In a place thousands of kilometres away from home, hearing and seeing people from a culture so familiar created a strange but comforting feeling.

For a moment, it did not feel quite so far from home.

From Batu Caves we continued with the day’s sightseeing and visited Menara Kuala Lumpur.

Menara KL offered a completely different perspective on the city. The glass-floor experience at the Sky Terrace was something we did not want to miss. It was a paid attraction and there were long lines, but the wait was worth it. Standing on the glass and looking down while taking photographs gives you that peculiar mixture of excitement and nervousness that these experiences are designed to create.

And then there was the view.

One of the best things about Menara KL is that you can look across the city and see the Petronas Towers themselves. The towers are spectacular from the ground, but seeing them from Menara KL gives you an entirely different appreciation of them. It is almost as though the landmark becomes part of the cityscape rather than simply being the cityscape.

Sunday: Inside the Petronas Towers

Sunday, May 21, was our second full day without office commitments, and we had deliberately kept the Petronas Towers interior visit for this part of the trip.

A few days earlier we had stood outside them. Now we were going inside.

We went up to the viewing level and experienced the city from the towers, including the famous glass bridge between the two buildings. There is something about going up a landmark like this that is difficult to separate from the experience of other great towers around the world.

For me, the feeling was almost the same as going up the Burj Khalifa to the 127th floor.

Same same, but different.

The cities are different, the buildings are different, and the views have their own character, but the feeling of looking at an enormous city from high above has something universal about it.

It also completed our Petronas experience nicely. We had first seen the towers from outside on a weekday evening, then seen them again from Menara KL, and finally stood inside them and looked out over Kuala Lumpur. The same landmark had given us three different perspectives.

Back to work

The weekend was over, but the trip was not.

May 22 and 23 were working days again. There was no need to squeeze another major attraction into those days. After work, we mostly relaxed at the hotel, visited local shops and returned to our now-familiar food routine at Mr Naan & Mrs Idli.

In a way, those quieter evenings belonged to the same trip as the towers and Batu Caves. Travel does not have to mean constantly moving from one attraction to another. Sometimes the nicest part is having a place where you know what dinner will be, knowing that the hotel is just a short walk from the office, and having someone with you who is sharing the whole experience.

That was what made Kuala Lumpur different from Singapore.

Singapore had started as my work trip, with Pragati joining me only after the office portion had already begun. Malaysia was shared from day one. I went to work in the mornings, came back for lunch, returned to work, and then we went out together in the evenings. When the weekend arrived, the workday restrictions disappeared and the trip opened up into full-day exploration.

The city itself made that transition unusually easy. KL Sentral kept us connected, the office was almost next door, the trains took us to places like Batu Caves, and our accidental discovery of Mr Naan & Mrs Idli meant that even food — something that can sometimes complicate international travel for us — became effortless.

On May 23, we flew back to Chennai.

Kuala Lumpur stayed with me not because it was an uninterrupted holiday. It was almost the opposite. It was a trip where work and travel were woven together so naturally that neither seemed to get in the way of the other.

There were the big memories: the Petronas Towers, Menara KL, Batu Caves and the view from above. There was the shopping, the GoPro, Pragati’s handbag and the electronics stores that I could happily have spent far too much time exploring.

But there was also the everyday rhythm — the short walk to the office, the train rides from KL Sentral, meeting Pragati for lunch, evening sightseeing, and ending the day with hot gulab jamun.

Perhaps that is why Kuala Lumpur feels less like a sightseeing checklist and more like a lived-in travel memory.