So it's Monday now, which means we've been here for a week.

It's gone incredibly quickly. We're due to fly home to Kuching tomorrow, and although we've actually been quite busy, it feels as if we're only just getting going.

I'm glad we decided not to skip a quick spell in KL. It was home for many years, and it has been really good to start to pick up some of the threads after such a long absence. Better still would have been to have more time, so that we could have caught up with more people. But we've been away from our current home for a long time, and Kuching therefore beckons.

After more than six months in the cold, we're sadly de-acclimatized, and have been finding the "34-degrees-feels-like-44" a bit exhausting. Also, our feet, so long encased in socks and boots, have become pathetically soft...

But Nigel is doing incredibly well... He now has entire days that are headache-free. Either the ghastly thing is nearing the end of its nasty course, or the medicine prescribed by the neurologist in Istanbul has really worked wonders...

Anyway, KL... Apart from our gallery visit (recorded here), our time has been spent like this:

-- Catching up with the monorail (really nice to see the four-car units back in action):




-- Enjoying the urban vibe:










-- Meeting old friends at new places:












-- And meeting old friends in their home:


-- Catching up with what's going down in KL's Chinatown (some of this reno project was under way before we left, but there's LOTS that's new):











-- Buying the kind of stuff you have less opportunity to buy in Kuching

-- Going to our first MPO concert since January 2020... M for Mendelssohn... Delightful

-- Checking out old favourite cafes (Urbean, Jamaica Blue, Saravanaa Bhavan, Ali Food Corner, The Common Grind...), and discovering new ones (Sepiring at Midvalley did us a pretty good lunch on shoe-buying day, and it would be nice to return to Timothy for more than a coffee):



-- Strolling through GMBB, a "creative community mall", which hosts exhibitions, spaces for workshops, small arts shops, and lots more (we'd seen a couple of exhibitions here before we left, but it's nice to see it all growing so impressively). I especially enjoyed the Borneo's Tree Of Life collection of photographs by Chien C. Lee (featuring aspects of Borneo that I'm unlikely to ever see...), and the Fusion Wayang Kulit Gallery (because I'm always going to love puppets):




-- Collecting my computer (repaired under warranty -- yay!)

-- Learning to work the new phones (and earbuds)


So, a very productive week. Just that one flight tomorrow, and our odyssey (this one at least) will be over.