Kuala Lumpur is an Amazing City

The food in KL is the best in Asia.  There is so much diversity or cuisines and food types.  The best is the street food you can pick up in Bukit Bintang, Chinatown, or in the sidewalk cafe's near the hotels in near the center of KL.  There is amazing Indian Food, of a variety that makes you realize that what we think of as Indian in the USA is Americanized-Indian food.  I had Northern and Southern Indian, for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Then there are food courts in every shopping mall with huge assortments of chinese, Malaysian, Thai, Indonesian, and Indian foods.  You can try four different cuisines in an evening and never spend more than $20.

The city is quite safe from street crime in as much as any city can be.  I'm sure it happens, but I didn't see any of it while I was there from 7 to 11 of May.  What I did see was an amazing city choked full of people, and cars, and buses.  I saw gleaming towers from the future...

Next to broken neighborhoods from the past...

There is a vibrancy and freedom about KL life that you don't feel in buttoned down Singapore.  Yes there is wide disparities in living standards, but you feel like people in KL have a more free and dignified life.  The government subsidizes everything - Fuel, cooking oil, rice, bus and subway fares.  It is so cheap to eat and travel in Malaysia.  

You can combine that with some of the most interesting urban vistas in the world and you have a city with style, heart, and soul.

In the streets at night, you have a completely different experience from Singapore.  Where Singapore is modern and convenient, KL is open, dirty, and real.  Hawkers stand in front of sidewalk restaurants and shove menus in your face to tempt you in.  Tatoo artists ply their trade on the street as live advertising.  And real artists sit in quiet corners and paint.  

And then across town, there are groups of young people sitting in front of the Petronas Towers talking and eating as if the towers themselves were a sidewalk attraction to congregate around and enjoy.

As a New Yorker, used to contrasting urban environments, KL is very familiar and fascinating.  

Singapore is Like a Painted Mask

Seven Days a week with self-funded sick days and no time off for 10 years.  That's the real life for taxi drivers and unskilled labor in Singapore.  They work 10-12 hours a day, seven days a week, and they have to pay their employers for the days off they take or the sick days they must take.  They get no vacation benefits, and no health benefits.  When they fall ill they must pay the hospital for each procedure.  If they can't afford treatment, the hospital will not provide it.  Its a darwinian existence in a society that worships work and shopping.

On the outside, Singapore appears to be an Asian city that works.  Subways, roadways, hotels, and offices glitter.  The service is superb, the food varied and inexpensive, and every convenience is available.  Income taxes are super low, attracting wealth from across the globe.  But it comes at a cost for the vast majority of the population who work tirelessly to support and subsidize the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

What you see on the outside is what Singapore wants you to see.  It takes social effort to peer beneath the painted mask to see the mean and cruel the economic and social structure.  I spent three days and nights in this city from 3 to 7 May, 2013.  I arrived after a 24 hour flight, JFK to Narita, Narita to Singapore, in economy class.  I didn't sleep on either leg and arrived in Singapore at 1:30am on Saturday night.  My taxi driver had already been working 6 hours and had another 5 to go.  We chatted about his life as we drove across town from Changi to my hotel, the Swiss Hotel Merchant Court.  I have interviewed cab drivers in Singapore on all of my 6 visits to this island nation and they all are the same.  The drivers relate the frustration of driving endless days, the powerlessness they feel in their lives, and the anger they feel towards their government which enacts policies designed to keep them where they are.

Singapore was founded in 1963, when the governor of the tiny malaysian outpost broke away from the newly independent Malaysian State six years after independence.  At the time no one was sure Singapore could survive on its own.  It was a small port, a colonial outpost, and many poor fishing villages.  But it created business friendly conditions that attracted trade and capital and is today a far wealthier and more successful nation than Malaysia, even thought the two states are interdependent and quite close politically.

But Singapore hasn't just thrived because of the attraction of capital and trade.  It has also thrived because of low wages, and exhaustive working conditions.  A state that provides high end shopping pleasures for the 1% of its inhabitants on the backs of the rest is not a successful nation state.

On the outside, this city looks amazing.  You can party here in an environment that is designed for convenience and pleasure.  The shopping malls and outdoor arcades are beyond anything I've seen in the West.

But underneath lies a huge social cost - mass homelessness, poverty, and despair.