Letters from the Equator

I’ll be away in the UK for a week again, on another work assignment. I’m sort of getting used to it. Somehow, I’m not so drawn to the place like I’m drawn to Chicago. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s been around way longer than I could possibly imagine.

UK folks like to keep things they way they used to be. All the old buildings look pretty much like they used to decades ago. They’re different from the inside, but you quickly forget that the moment you step outside.

Somehow, I hate that feeling. It feels as though I’m stuck in a time-warp. I’m neither going forward nor backwards. And the weather doesn’t really help either.

Contrast that to the fact that KL is expanding so rapidly, you can quickly lose your way because there are so many new roads that lead to each other, that it often feels like the city is growing.

Just the other day, I was driving along my regular route to work, and I noticed there was a huge glass building that sat squatting below the Telekom building along the Federal Highway.

When did they put THAT up?

When I’ve gone away from KL for a week, it feels almost too long. It’s like, if I was gone just a short while, within that small time span they had planted 10 new skyscrapers and linked Subang Jaya to Kota Kinabalu via a new super-highway or something.

But if you time travel a million years into the future and go to London, you’ll still know where you are - and that’s because they’re never going to get rid of the Tower of London, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, Westminister Abbey, and that weird-looking gherkin.

The only thing that makes London feel like it’s traveling forwards into the future are those TopGear episodes.

Categorized as discoveries/travel, life/work