Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Mar 18th

Today we visited two very different places in Kuala Lumpur.
The first was the oldest pewter manufacturer, Royal Selangor. It was started over 100 years ago by a single man who started making pewter for the local people. He had 4 sons that each started their own pewter manufacturing company. And today, only one still produces pewter for all over the world. They have a special room where we were able to take a pewter disk, put our initial / hallmark on it and use a wooden hammer and a special wooden tool / bowl to pound out our own pewter dish. It was a lot of fun and actually not very difficult. We only made a simple bowl and their actual professional pewter is much more detailed and intricate. We toured the factory and they do not use any form of automation. They pour the pewter into molds to cast it, trim it and polish all the pieces by hand. They demonstrated how a handle for a stein is made and she made it look very easy. They also showed us how they use a special hammer to pound the detailed imprint into a piece. The piece we watched had about 1,400 facets on it - each of which has to be struck twice exactly to make the imprint. We did purchase a coffee or tea urn that the lid is so precisely made that there is not need for a seal. The metal just seals itself.
Our next stop was the Batu Caves. The caves themselves are about 400 million years old and the limestone cave became a place of worship over time. It was discovered in about 1900 by archaeologists. To this day it still is a place of worship and is called the Temple Cave. The wooden steps were built in the 1920's and before that there were bamboo ladders that worshipers would use to go up and down. Then by 1940 the 272 concrete steps were finished. They are painted in many colors from bottom to the top. In the Temple Cave there are multiple religious shrines and temples for worshipers. There are also many monkeys, the long-tailed macaques around the temple. They are the usual inquisitive and pick-pocket monkeys we have encountered in our travels. One managed to take a key chain off a lady's backpack while she was taking a photo. As you can see, I had a conversation with one of them about not taking any of our stuff...Читать далее