This afternoon, my hosts drove me down to KLCC, itself a dislocating experience as we, the GF and I, went about it on foot so nothing seemed quite recognisable, even aside from the five years away. The Petronas towers themselves were instantly familiar though – among my favourite, perhaps my favourite skyscrapers, and well positioned against the grey skies that are most flattering to their steel cladding.
Since it was the weekend the crowds inside the mall were also instantly familiar, but I went up to the bookshop and browsed for a bit. Then we strolled around the KLCC park (I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t recognise the water park bit – had I never seen it before?) and then had an average coffee and cake.
Our building whatsapp group from Istanbul was lively today and, unusually, it was amusing rather than distressing in some way. Someone had spotted that one of the small shops on the ground floor had installed an awning made of corrugated plastic, which marred the historic look of the building. There was much distress on the group, expressed in Turkish of course, and Google Translate did its usual extremely literal translation which got all the poetry of the language. The building manager, who is generally the subject of much abuse on this group, said he would look into it and, a few hours later, posted a video of the awning tumbling down like the Saddam Hussein statue in 2003. And so, said, he, ‘Removed after necessary warning’ with the accompanying puff of the chest left to the imagination.
The third episode of that MH370 documentary introduced a new theory, of the plane having been shot down by the Americans due to a cargo of sensitive electronics being taken to China. Again, required some suspension of disbelief, the shooting down and full cover up of a civilian aircraft somewhere like the South China Sea. The series left a foul taste in the mouth, all the amateur investigators so eager to be right, and reminded me of why I rarely watch Netflix shows, almost never true crime documentaries, and certainly never flight investigations. Well, I daresay the truth will out some day, whether the day of declassification or the Last Day itself.