Living in Kuala Lumpur as an expat

In my free time I usually hung out with my flat mates. I finished work around 05:30 pm which meant I was home around 06:15 pm. It took me 5 minutes to walk to the LRT station, wait a few minutes for the LRT, and then sit (or most of the time stand actually) for 20 minutes to get out at the station at the foot of the hill of our condominium. After a 15 minute walk uphill I would be sweating in the elevator before I got home. My flat mates got back later than I would, usually around 07:00 pm. When everybody was home we would go out for dinner and have a drink in Bangsar or play some pool. Very often we met some locals during dinner or while having a drink and we made a lot of different friends. For some reason you are very interesting to Malaysian people as you are white. Some of them invited us at their homes for parties, to teach us Mahjong or to come to their own food stalls and tell us all about their cuisine. Great experiences!
In the weekends on Fridays and Saturdays we usually went out to the clubs in Kuala Lumpur. KL has a great clubbing scene with very trendy places. Typical was that we usually were one of the few Western people and that meant a lot of people wanted to get to know us. We’ve been invited to the opening of new clubs, to fashion shows and all sorts of things. Someone even invited us for his wedding, although we just met him a few hours earlier. It’s a nice, but sometimes a little bit awkward situation of constantly being approached by people who want to get to know you just because you are Western. Besides that, people loved to make a picture with you. They were usually bold enough to come up to you and just asked if they could take picture together. One time even, when I was going to the Merdeka celebration with my flatmates, we were photographed very sneaky by some Chinese people in the metro. They saw we saw them doing that and after that they had the guts to ask us to make photo together. Once we did that, all the rest of the people in the metro wanted to do the same! A really crazy situation and we were posing the rest of our trip.
On Saturdays and Sundays we undertook daytrips (see the next section about travelling) or we just hung out at the apartment. I didn’t do any sports in Malaysia, except for the trekkings and the walks uphill to and from the LRT station.
We used to travel to work and around the city either using the public transport or a taxi. Public transport in Malaysia is very well organized. It has trains, busses, a monorail and an LRT (metro) which work very well together. The only problem is that Malaysians do not have the decency to let people out of the trains first before entering. So when people are trying to get out, others are pushing in already and very often people who had to get out did not manage to get out in time. During rush hour there were special public transport officers who would stand at the door and check if everyone who wanted to leave was out before letting other people in. So that was quite a difference from what I was used to with the decent people in the working life.
So all and all, I had a pretty Western life in Kuala Lumpur. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to travel around the country and see so much more than the well developed parts of Malaysia.