Jalan Petaling and its nearby Central Market (both in the heart of Chinatown) are more or less the hub of street life in Kuala Lumpur. A busy, heaving and extremely colourful warren of narrow lanes, tiny shops, glittering stores, rickety stalls and more, this is the place to come for shopping, for eating out, for getting a taste of KL at its busiest.The entire area’s very cosmopolitan and very exotic- every other shop has a name lettered in Chinese (or in some cases, Tamil- the Indian presence is very obvious here, where many restaurants specialise in `curry foods’; lots of women wander around in saris and salwar kurtas; sellers of pirated VCDs and DVDs sell Hindi movie prints; and the latest Hindi film music blares from roadside microphones). My husband and I, being Indians, weren’t particularly taken up with the `Indian’ aspect of KL- it was too much like home to feel like a foreign country!
You could spend entire days wandering around Jalan Petaling and Central Market and still not get bored- there’s so much to see and buy! We spent about two hours on a long round of window-shopping through Central Market’s antique stores, flower shops, souvenir stores and the famous Royal Selangor Pewter store. The Royal Selangor factory dates back to 1885 and is today the world’s leading producer of pewter- their pewter conforms to the highest accepted standards- it contains 97% tin (the rest is copper). The range of items on display at the store is spectacular and very tempting- though the only thing we actually could afford was a pretty little pewter elephant- exquisite!
Outside, the array of stalls is fascinating: souvenirs, trashy junk, shoes- and food. Some of the food stalls sell strange local sweets and savouries (neither my husband nor I have too much of a liking for Malay food, so we never sampled any of their wares, though). A tiny clutch of them sell fruit- rambutans and mangosteens in particular- which we promised ourselves we’d buy, but never actually got around to it. The food stalls, however, are heavily outnumbered by the rest of the stalls: T-shirt shops and countless stalls line the streets, selling everything from shoes and belts to watches, pens, bags, wallets, VCDs and DVDs - all of them pirated. While we were there, there was a sudden police scare and all the pirated VCDs / DVDs stalls disappeared in a twinkling - but came back after 30 minutes, when the cops had retreated.