I was thrown out of my hotel this morning. Well, not literally, but that is how it felt. Instead of going to Malacca for a day I decided to extend my stay in Kuala Lumpur. About 11.30 (my start to the day is gradually getting later and later) I dropped in at reception. The receptionist was a surly Indian lady who looked like a cheap prostitute sacked by her pimp -- I could be politically correct here and say downsized but she was the wrong side of chubby. Up-sized perhaps?
“Full house, today full house.” She said aggressively, not looking up from her magazine. Muttering to myself I turned on my heel and went to pack.
There is no chance of getting a taxi from the Heritage Station Hotel. They might as well have removed the station from the map when they replaced it with the concrete monstrosity just down the road. As the new station uses the same tracks and platforms and is actually less conveniently situated than the new one, I wonder what they were thinking of. The architect may have been to blame. Looking at the elegant curves, clever layout and spacial functionality of the new station, it is clear that the architect trained in Milton Keynes or Nottingham and slept through most of his lectures.
Few trains leave from this station today, for it only serves one line and, this being KL, has no simple connections with the rest of the transport infrastructure. Transport hub, interchange, connectivity and convenience are not words in the vocabularies of KL’s city planers. To get from the Heritage to the nearest station on the next line, you have to go through the freight yard dodging forklifts, cross the tracks via a bridge and 40 steps, scurry under an advertising board that is home to a thousand shitting starlings and walk quarter of a mile along a footpath. The footpath is interesting. Somebody must have thought, hey, this walk will be inconvenient when it’s raining so lets put a plastic dome over it. They did, and in the heat and humidity it has aged shockingly to a brown, green and yellow horror that wouldn’t look out of place in a 1960s block of flats in Birmingham. It does have one redeeming feature though, apart from keeping the rain at bay: its acoustics. Walking along, late at night you can hear footsteps. Its dark and this is a quiet part of time, so for reassurance your turn round to see if the person following is a threat. Nobody there. You stop. The footsteps continue. There is nobody around and you can see clearly for 200m in either direction. Most disturbing. It was three days before I worked out what was going on. The curved roof above the path somehow captures the sound of pedestrians as they enter the walkway, carrying the sound of their footsteps along and round the corner to petrify the poor shmut scuttling along in the dark.
“Full house, today full house.” She said aggressively, not looking up from her magazine. Muttering to myself I turned on my heel and went to pack.
There is no chance of getting a taxi from the Heritage Station Hotel. They might as well have removed the station from the map when they replaced it with the concrete monstrosity just down the road. As the new station uses the same tracks and platforms and is actually less conveniently situated than the new one, I wonder what they were thinking of. The architect may have been to blame. Looking at the elegant curves, clever layout and spacial functionality of the new station, it is clear that the architect trained in Milton Keynes or Nottingham and slept through most of his lectures.
Few trains leave from this station today, for it only serves one line and, this being KL, has no simple connections with the rest of the transport infrastructure. Transport hub, interchange, connectivity and convenience are not words in the vocabularies of KL’s city planers. To get from the Heritage to the nearest station on the next line, you have to go through the freight yard dodging forklifts, cross the tracks via a bridge and 40 steps, scurry under an advertising board that is home to a thousand shitting starlings and walk quarter of a mile along a footpath. The footpath is interesting. Somebody must have thought, hey, this walk will be inconvenient when it’s raining so lets put a plastic dome over it. They did, and in the heat and humidity it has aged shockingly to a brown, green and yellow horror that wouldn’t look out of place in a 1960s block of flats in Birmingham. It does have one redeeming feature though, apart from keeping the rain at bay: its acoustics. Walking along, late at night you can hear footsteps. Its dark and this is a quiet part of time, so for reassurance your turn round to see if the person following is a threat. Nobody there. You stop. The footsteps continue. There is nobody around and you can see clearly for 200m in either direction. Most disturbing. It was three days before I worked out what was going on. The curved roof above the path somehow captures the sound of pedestrians as they enter the walkway, carrying the sound of their footsteps along and round the corner to petrify the poor shmut scuttling along in the dark.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment