Business Class to Kuala Lumpur

On Monday, it was time for me to finally get out of town. My flight wasn’t until 4:20 pm, so I had time to enjoy another wonderful buffet breakfast in my hotel in Bangkok and to walk around the city for some last minute Thai food and atmosphere.

Around noon, I checked out of my hotel and hopped in a cab to the airport. This was the first time that I had flown from one foreign airport to another, not counting connection flights, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. I was flying Lufthansa Airlines, which also was new to me. I got to the airport early and the Lufthansa station wasn’t set up yet, so I sat around in the back and waited. When it did get set up, it was completely chaotic, not exactly what I was expecting from a German airline, and I got in line at the back of something that appeared to be a line to one of the agents. After about two minutes of standing there, I was pulled out of line by an airline employee who told me that I could move to a different line, which only had two people in it. Beautiful. And it turned out that it was the business class line and when I got to the counter, I was upgraded to business class. Beautiful. It was only a two-hour flight, but I still enjoyed it. It was kind of odd being an American on a flight from Thailand to Malaysia and being spoken to by the flight attendants in German, but, you know, whatever.

I arrived in Kuala Lumpur at around nine and hopped on the train that leads from the airport to the main train station in the city. That took a little under a half hour and from there I took a cab to my hotel. I walked around the area a bit and got some dinner at an Italian restaurant next to the hotel and called it a night.

I only had two full days in Kuala Lumpur and the only thing I knew that I wanted to do was to go up the Petronas Towers and the KL Tower. I was told that the trip up the KL Tower was better, but I’ve been a fan of the Petronas Towers for a decade and really wanted to do that trip, so that was what took up most of my first day.

To go up the Petronas Towers, you need to get in line early in the morning to get tickets. They start selling tickets at around 9:00 am and I arrived at the towers at 8:20 am. It was good that I arrived when I did because by 8:40 am, they had stopped letting people in line because they had already reached capacity. I didn’t get my ticket until around 10:30 am, so it was a long time in line, and when I did I had a choice for the 3RM ticket to the sky bridge or the 30RM (about US$10) for the trip to the sky bridge on the 41^st floor and the observation deck on the 86^th floor. (I also had an option of paying about 300RM for a trip to the sky bridge, the observation deck, and dinner on the 87^th floor, but I wasn’t paying an extra US$90 for dinner, especially in a town as cheap as Kuala Lumpur.) My ticket didn’t allow me entry until 5:00 pm, so I still had some time to kill in KL We’ll get to that and the trip to the top of the world in the next entry.