The two towers

“Name a Kuala Lumpur landmark.”

“The Petronas Towers”

“Name two Kuala Lumpur landmarks”

“Both Petronas Towers”

“Name Three Kuala Lumpur landmarks”

“…”

Looking out of a taxi window leaving Sentral station* , one of the Petronas towers hides the other, so it appears like there’s only one of them there. You can’t make the mistake elsewhere in town – they’re (now) the tallest twin towers in the world, a landmark to take your bearings from, like the Eiffel tower in Paris, but filled with oil companies rather than tourists.

The buildings are surprisingly classy up close, art deco with a hint of Moorish Islam and Khmer temple. Their walls are clad in stainless steel, and still look clean, unlike a lot of high-tech office architecture which gets as streaky as an oil derrick after a few years in operation.

We’re here to meet Margaret, to talk about one of the best-run alumni societies in the world. OUS Malaysia hold fantastic English language events every year, attended by thousands of local school students, for instance, including an essay competition observed by the national press. Because of their organisation and local know-how, they’re even contributing to a debate about the use of English in Malaysian schools.

She works on the 78th floor, higher than the tourist observation deck which is on the bridge between the towers. Security to get into her office was enormously elaborate, almost like a US airport. It was worth it for the interview, and for the view. The rest of town is laid out in front of you to gaze at (or film), and you can peep over at the workers in the other tower.

Without wishing to sound like a lift geek, the mechanics of getting tens of thousands of people up the towers and back again are pretty fascinating. Double-decker lifts shoot you up to a transfer lobby, so fast your ears pop. Then you have to transfer to another stopping lift, the local service, which takes you to whichever floor you actually wanted to reach.

Is that my bag?

The process can be elaborate – a vertical commute – and Margaret says it’s not worth the bother of going downstairs at lunchtimes. She takes a packed lunch. Lots of her office-mates do the same, though when we were filming they’d all made the trip downstairs, to go to Friday prayers.

It’s strange to think that this icon of Kuala Lumpur wasn’t built when I started secondary school. To judge by grime artists’ pop videos, modern London is the Gherkin and the London Eye – both recent additions I remember being constructed. Closer to home, my Oxford college has now doubled in physical size, adding lots of extra student accommodation, so I can already say that ‘I remember when this was all fields’. I didn’t realise I’d be so young when I started feeling old.

- Tom

*so many nouns in Bahasa are like that – English spellings, rationalised.

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