A relic from the Empire?

Growing up in the UK, you quickly get used to the fact that when England had an Empire they did a jolly good job of introducing all our sports to the various countries we'd stuck flags in and then sat back and watched them get better than us. Not so with the Malays. Although they do have a rather beautiful cricket pavillion in the middle of KL I don't see them pushing us any further down the world rankings in our major sportsjust yet. That said, if one of our other pass times were to become an Olympic sport we may have competition....

The activity in question is not so much a pass time as an institution. An art, if you will. It is the mighty art of queueing. Let me explain. Having seen Entrapment, we thought we should probably visit the skybridge at the Petronas Towers in KL (If you don't know what I mean - Petronas Towers = huge twin towers in KL, formerly world's tallest building, currently world's tallest twin towers. Two towers, connected half way up by a bridge...not one for those with issues being up high!). We went along one day to pick up our free tickets and were told to return the next morning at 8.30 as they had an allocation and they ran out pretty quickly. We were advised to turn up around 8 for an 8.30 opening so landed at about ten to and were greeted with what looked at first glance like a complete melee of people. But no...this was not chaos, this was an area about the size of a badminton court with a queue of people snaking up and down in a neat, organised mannor. Those at the front looked like they'd been there for some time - picture the footage you see of queues at Wimbledon, or for major launches of computer hardware. This was all impressive enough but the icing on the cake came when we noticed the guards. Yes, they had about 10 people marshelling the queue, and when the office opened at 8.30 they barracaded the entrance to the queue to prevent people jumping in, and from that point on would only let one representative of each group join the queue and they were escorted by a guard to the back to ensure no pushing in type shennanigans! Marvellous. A wonder to behold! Especially as the rest of queueing in Asia consists of people standing at the front ignoring any gathering of people who may have been waiting for the same service. In fact just yesterday Sharm was hassled away from a train ticket counter by a chap who came up beside him and actually stuck his head between Sharm's and the plexiglass in order to usurp him in the queue

I thought I'd share that with you all, and Sharm will return soon with an actual update of our activities!
To all in the UK - you'll be delighted to hear that it rained yesterday here and is cloudy today. It's still about 30 degrees, but at least we're not geting tans

Love to all!
Sue xx