Mistaken Identity

It was demoralising today that once again, somebody mistook me for another nationality. I've had security guards thinking I'm French, random guys on trains assuming I'm Dutch, and ladies of the night in Kuala Lumpur accusing me of being Australian.

The Birds

After a 6-hour coach ride (which felt more like a 4-hour coach ride punctuated by two hours of the coach sitting in various random car parks) I got to Kuala Lumpur, and walked from the Berjaya Times Square mall to our hotel. Along the way, I had taxi driver after taxi driver ask me if I wanted a ride.

As I got closer to the hotel, three women scuttled out of a doorway to ask if I wanted a ride. "Hey baby, do you remember me from Australia?" one of them lilted. I considered stopping and asking whether she'd served me a Thai green curry in the Gold Coast in 2008, or if she'd been queuing up for a delayed flight to Hong Kong with Qantas, but I had to assume she was just guessing I was Australian. After all, I was a solitary male, who needed a shave and a bath, and I was wearing shorts and pulling a suitcase. This was just the latest ignominous misidentification of my nationality (after the Singaporeans guessing I was French or Dutch) so I trundled along to my hotel, where the check in staff didn't believe my passport and had to wake up my wife before allowing me into the hotel room. That I had booked and paid for.

(I can't be too annoyed, because at the same time that this is going on, HSBC are continually texting me whenever my wife uses her bank card, as if she can't be trusted and her husband requires full financial oversight. It's strange living in the 1850s, it surely is.)

Anyway, today we got up and after I ate my own body weight in croissants, we took a taxi to the bird park. It's big: apparently one of the largest in Asia, and is chockful of peafowl, cattle egrets and blue crested pigeons. There are a lot of different aviaries, including some where the inmates will climb onto you. For a while I was amused as lories stood on a man's bald head, until a cockatoo alighted on my backpack and then tried to eat my camera.

Stop and Search

Today I took the MRT to the airport - slower and less convenient than a taxi, but without the stress of standing on the street, waiting for an elusive ride to appear. It was raining hard, so I had to sprint from the office to the station, and then yomp down the stairs as there's no down escalator from street level.

The hallways around the station are surprisingly crowded - probably because of the rain - it was strange, coming from Hong Kong, to encounter such a volume of slowly moving people in one place. I manhandled my case through the automatic barrier, and was about to throw myself down the escalator to the platform when I was stopped by the MRT security.

Mistaken meeting

Eventually I left the cold of Pacific Coffee, and walked up to Elgin Street. The club was shut and I'd drunk too much water, so I crossed over and was dithering about ducking into a bar to use the toilet when I felt someone looking at me. Over the street, a tall girl in a very short dress was looking at me. She smiled, and then spoiled the effect by tripping as one of her heels got stuck in a gap in the pavement.