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KLCC & Aquaria

Kuala Lumpur's modern centre is a Manhattan-ish thriving 21st century nest where business, shopping and entertainment facilities abound.
Here's where you'll find the Petronas Towers and Aquaria - an exotic aquarium.
KLCC is also home to the finest bars and best hotels and, the hypermodern monorail also crosses the area...

The downtown KL business district of KLCC (Kuala Lumpur City Centre) has impressed me.

The swanky bars, the high-end restaurants and high-end everything, some of the best shops are found here. But I was more into photography and fast exploration.

KLCC is a modern district, inaugurated in August 1999. Pretty much everything looks fresh, new.

Despite the excitements in the area, I didn't find KLCC crowded at the time of my visit.
It seems the city has evolved rapidly and "over-stretched". It didn't look like Kuala Lumpur residents were flooding the area.

I'm unaware of any real estate bubble and Malaysia is a very prosperous country indeed, but this vast modern centre seemed huge for a city home to much less than 2 million.

Some parts of KLCC looked like Manhattan, but I can't omit mentioning that even the most modern high-rises had a special touch of Asian shapes (traditional shapes, forms reflect from the most modern glass and concrete buildings).

So, KLCC is not just a mere collection of huge glass and concrete boxes.

It's not just the Petronas Towers and the Aquaria that are appealing, but KLCC itself. Reason why the area is full of foreign tourists.

I saw lots of Western tourists roaming around (I think first of all because of the Petronas Towers)...

Swanky bars and plenty of high-end shops are bountiful in KLCC.

In order to avoid any confusion, I should also mention that the monorail doesn't run exactly in the KLCC LRT station's proximity, but it runs south of Aquaria across the Jalan Sultan Ismail area.

Except for several groups of tourists, as I was walking across, I saw surprisingly few people.
The historic area had bigger crowds, more people per square meter than this hypermodern business district.

Obviously, the old historic districts pretty much everywhere around the World, act as the "real heart" of the cities. The city has already integrated them into its "organism".
Pre-conceived modern districts rarely manage to connect to the city's organic "blood flow". But hopefully this will happen in time...

KLCC is full of multilingual signs. Normally there are Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and English signs, but Arabic and Japanese are also frequent here and there.

It's not surprising in a multicultural country like Malaysia. In other countries, ethnic minorities can only dream of such rights.

Everything looked and felt new, as it they were all built a day before!

Barely used... it felt new, clean.

One thing that can be very bothering is the lack of public toilets in KLCC - once you're out walking on the streets...

The large number of bars, restaurants (especially around Bukit Bintang) and the shops (also in Bukit Bintang and the ones inside the Suria Mall) have attracted me in several times during my time in KL.

Another place worth mentioning is and the KLCC Park - not a large one, but ideal for taking a rest and inspiring oxygen.

Aquaria

Opened in 1997, Aquaria is an oceanarium underneath the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre.

We have to note the "KLCC" stands for "Kuala Lumpur City Centre", which is not the same as "Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre" - although the starting letters are coincidentally the same.
The latter is part of KLCC, though.

In 2014, at Aquaria there were over 250 different species and over 5,000 unique animals (mostly creatures living in the water).

An interesting thing is the 90 m (300 ft) underwater tunnel. Sharks and all sorts of other fish "flew" above my head.

Aquaria is essentially a large aquarium in the middle of a landlocked city. All that habitat has to be maintained artificially and I'm sure it requires tremendous costs.

I can't imagine how such a business can be profitable.

Although the crowds can be large, still, even to pay the electricity bill, rotating the water, pay the personnel, a lot of money is required... in addition: keeping the fish alive, potentially even acquiring new, paying for all the equipment and so on...

There was a small souvenir shop there at Aquaria, just before the exit.

A wide variety of gadgets, souvenirs about Aquaria and Malaysia too... But I didn't fancy anything and many of those products were flawed, so I remained with the souvenirs I bought before...

Aquaria is definitely worth paying a visit. I struggled a lot to get there in time and on my last evening I finally got to see it!

Several more photos of the place...

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