The crazy weightless room of Kuala Lumpur

The National Planetarium in Kuala Lumpur features what must be the craziest room in all of Malaysia: a square space with padded walls, it’s built at an angle but shaped as if it were straight up and down. (See video below.)

It’s supposed to give visitors a sense of the disorienting effects of weightlessness that astronauts deal with, and it works: try to stand up “straight” and you find yourself unaccountably falling sidewards into the padded wall.

It’s Day 29 of the trip for me, but Masayo just joined me yesterday and I wanted to show her something fun. Back on Day 15 I came to the planetarium with another tourist I’d met at my hostel and I thought Masayo would like it.

The National Planetarium (Planetarium Negara) is actually a museum, kids’ science learning fun center, observatory, and a real planetarium, all rolled into one. It’s a short train ride from Chinatown and a little hike from KL Sentral station.

But my favorite part is “the crazy room”, as I called it. It’s probably generally meant for kids, but there weren’t any in there when we were, so we became kids ourselves.

It’s a lot of fun to try to stand because your brain tries to use the straight lines of the walls and corners for balance, but up and down is actually different. Sometimes you can fool your brain for a few seconds and stand ok, but then you go tumbling and giggling into the wall.

Masayo and I tried to stand up, tried to walk around, did some spectacularly inept dancing, and dropped coins from one hand to the other, which is not a easy as it sounds.

We jumped down the little escape hatch in the corner and saw the rest of the museum – looking at displays in Malay and English about general astronomy, and also Malaysia’s role in space exploration. On the top floor is a space capsule you can climb in. It’s very tiny; I can’t imagine the isolation and sense of claustrophobia astronauts must get sitting inside it so far from Earth.

Video in the crazy weightless room:

On the way back down the lovely stairs through the mini-jungle outside the planetarium, Masayo and I sat down to relax. Some kids came up to us to chat. They must study English in school here – these kids were around 8 or 9 and could understand and reply in basic English.

After the planetarium it was back to the Red Dragon Inn in Chinatown to do some online work, trying to earn money for travel. Our heads calmed down from the crazy room eventually!

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