KP in KL

A small precursor to the month ahead:

Well, I haven’t even made it out of the city yet, and my blogging about my trip to Singapore has already begun. You know what that means. Things are never just normal with me. To update you, Paul and I are flying out today (on separate flights) for Singapore where we will spend the next month or two in a hotel while Paul works on a project there. Don’t feel left out if you didn’t know this. I just found out less than 48 hours ago and here I sit in the airport.

To begin my trip, you should have seen me lugging my 55 pound bag and overloaded carry-on down the broken sidewalks, across the big intersection of traffic, down the escalators to the subway, and all the way to the “Sentral” station all by myself. I do feel like an accomplished big girl since I did all this on my own today as Paul is usually the pack mule, but as you can imagine it wasn’t pretty. I think I almost pulled my arm out of socket trying to lift the bag up and down the curbs while dodging traffic, and was drenched by the end of it all. If only I was drenched in rain instead of the alternative. Bottom line is, I managed to check my bag in and let Paul know I made it to the train without being a casualty of KL traffic in the process.

After the subway ride, I got on the express train at KL Sentral Station to go directly to the airport. Seeing that there were more than enough seats to go around for the small number of passengers on this trip, I chose a group of four seats facing each other and put my carry on in the bag next to me. I waited for everyone to board for about 5 minutes, thinking if it got to full on the train I would happily get up and move to a single set of seats and give a larger group my set of four. But it didn’t fill up, and I settled into my king size suite with a perfect view of the tv. Just as I did this, I realized I settled in too soon. A very tall lanky man wearing Timberland boots, t-shirt blinged out in gold designs, and a blindingly gold necklace and watch, who looked like he should be doing hurdles in the Olympics, in fact I’m almost certain he did win half a dozen track events at one time in his life, walked in, surveyed the seats around him and stood in front of me. I too surveyed the many empty seats around wondering why in the world he was standing up, then I quickly put my head down and attempted to look very busy on my phone and refrained from making eye contact in an effort to keep this king size suite to myself. Apparently it was this very charm that did him in because he asked to sit by me. Who does that?!

Pretty sure this guy could have been his brother...or brotha.

I have this thing where I like my personal space, and I don’t like to share it with strangers. Well, I pretty much realized I better get over it for the next 28 minute train ride because not only did he sit in the group of four with me, he sat directly across from me, with his long hurdler legs under my seat and his knees almost touching mine. These lanky legs of his had me pinned in, and I would have had to do hurdles over them to get out of this tight position. Then, since his head was directly under the TV, I couldn’t look at the TV or else it looked like I was staring directly at him. I consider myself a somewhat socially awkward person because I am pretty terrible at dealing with social situations of any kind, and have a hard time coming up with things to talk about since I was not blessed with the gift of gab. If I had any nails to bite off I would have dealt with this situation by eating them for my lunch. Needless to say, this was Awkward with a big fat A.

So with some giant Timberlands under my seat and knees in my face, I had no other choice than to engage myself in the conversation he tried three times to start. Turns out Ibriham is from Ghana, but lives in China, he’s not married and he loves iphones. I didn’t get around to asking him about his non-metaphorical track record. So for 28 minutes, we made small talk with several awkward silences. I hope he was not wanting me to show him to his gate at the airport because I high-tailed it as soon as we arrived to recover my lost personal space.

Now as I sit here at my gate in the airport, things are staying interesting as I watch what looks to be an entire plane of Romanians walking past me in their hiking gear, large backpacks, and Chinese pointy sun hats like you usually see on Asian people, not Romanians. I think this trip is just getting revved up! Just wait,… I’m sure there’s more to come over the next month. I’m so good at getting myself into awkward situations it’s impossible not to have a little thing or two to share.