We came across Red Dragon and for 50RM (about 8 pounds) we took a windowless room but with aircon and communal showers. The cold room was a nice change from just having a fan and we needed it as KL was very humid and muggy. Both feeling hungry we headed out to get some lunch and settled on Nando's - the Portuguese chicken restaurant chain and ordered salads as we felt we needed some greenery.
With lunch over we wandered around the markets and streets of China Town and also made the trip to the Bukit Bintang area where our hostel we had booked for Christmas was. We didn't stay here on arrival as they only had dorm rooms (which also would have been more than 50 a night) until our reservation from the 24th. But it looked nice so we were pleased to be checking in there after 2 nights in Chinatown.
We decided to stay in the Bintang area for a drink and wander around. The area has lots of interesting bars, restaurants and shopping malls. As we headed back to our digs given we hadn't eaten, we went Western and had McDonald's ! It made a nice change to rice and noodles.
The following day we took a bus to the Batu Caves which feature in these pictures. You have to climb 272 steps to get into the caves but the view is good when you look behind and the Hindu temple inside is very interesting.
On returning to town from the caves, we decided to go to the mall KLCC, we took the metro there it was a nice mall with lots of interesting shops although carrying a backpack I can't really buy things. But it was nice to wander around for a few hours. The mall is at the foot of the Petronas twin towers which was the highest towers to exist until Taipei 101 took over in 2004. I grabbed this picture from Yahoo as we wanted to take a picture by night was it was often raining hard at that time of day. That night we stayed in our place to watch the Man Utd vs. Everton game but only joined the game 30 mins in as other people in the hostel were watching a DVD. It was 1-1 when we started watching but luckily we scraped back a penalty goal in the 88th minute (come on Ronaldo!) so we were happy.
On Christmas eve we moved into our new lodgings - The Haven Guesthouse, a really lovely hostel with wooden stairs and walls. We booked into a loft room which was very cute with a sofa and wardrobe in it. The hostel offers free Internet, tea, coffee and toast with a selection of spreads.. I opted to peanut butter on many occasions. It was really lovely and one of the partners was super friendly. We decided to head to another mall just outside town for the afternoon. We had to take the bus there, but it was pretty easy to do and dropped us right outside.
The mall has around 450 shops but as we were hungry we decided to eat first and saw they had a Carl's Jr restaurant (US burger chain) we over ordered and were both stuffed so decided to walk it off. We headed off separately as Ryan wanted to look at phones and computers and I wanted a new skirt for Christmas day. After 2 hours we met up and decided to head back to our hostel until we saw the rain, thunder and lightning outside. Even though we were getting the bus we would have got soaked waiting so we caught sight of a Borders bookshop in a mall next door so Ryan headed for the magazine section whist I wandered around the mall for a while. We waited for the bus for around 20 mins as the traffic was unbelievable. That's one thing we have both noticed here in KL, the traffic is the worst I have seen in any city - just the volume is scary and its not due to any accidents either. So once on the bus we crawled along the 5 miles to get back and it took about 1hr! Arriving back at the hostel at 8pm we chilled out for a bit and then thought we would go out for a drink to celebrate Christmas Eve. 
At 10pm we headed out on the streets not expecting what greeted us. The place was crazy, people were everywhere, spraying fake snow and silly string - two things neither of us like now I am not a bar humbug person but they were spraying all over random strangers and cars.. we had to duck and dive through the crowds.
We found solice in an Irish bar around the corner from us - Delany's. The staff had Santa hats and were handing out gifts to people of noisey blow horns, clappers and party poppers. The noise of everyone using them was immense. Suddenly the group next to us all got up from their table and headed to a clearing at the front of the bar and started... wait for it... a countdown from 10 to Christmas day! We thought we had lost a week and it was New Year. It was very strange but fun at the same time especially when they started to do a Congo line around the bar as depicted below.
We got chatting to an ex-army guy from England who actually lived in Moscow now. He was very kind and bought us a couple of beers and based on how I felt the next day they were the couple I didn't need. It was a good night though and helped us not to be sad to be away from home.
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