Malaysia

Easily one of my favorite ports so far. I loved every port for many different reasons. In terms of places I’d go back to or even live, South Africa wins and Malaysia follows it. I flew to Kuala Lumpur where I spent most of my time, I’m so glad I did. It sounded cool at first but it was a huge hassle to get off the boat and back on. We didn’t have a dock so we had to take life boats to and from the port and the ship. It took forever and it was an incubator inside those things. On day 1 I pretty much just walked around Penang, got some great lunch, bought calling cards and used the internet. At night I went to a shadow puppet performance, which was really cool! We learned about the tradition of Wang Kulit (that’s what it’s called). The puppets are made out of goat or cow skin, and even though you only see their shadow, they are very intricately painted. The art work is really cool. I was very interested in the music. In Malaysian music you hear many different gongs, drums, and the lead instrument is the Seranai,which is similar to a clarinet or an Indian Nagaswaram. I won’t give you a lesson on Wang Kulit here, but if you want to learn more, just ask ☺. My flight was at 8am so I had to get up really early to get there on time. I had the best blueberry muffin of my life at the airport cuz it’s been so long… anyway my first day in Kuala Lumpur was so cool. I met up with my group at this hotel (The Royale Bintang) and we had a few ideas of what we wanted to go check out. After talking to one taxi driver he told us he’ll take us on a tour for 4 hours for 200 ringgits (between 9 of us it costed like under 7 bucks for the whole time). We went to a huge Chinese temple that was really colorful and had awesome architecture. There was a tourtise pond there; there were a million turtles it was cool. We went to the King’s palace (well the gate at least). It was kinda like Buckingham with soldiers who don’t move and some sat on glides dale horses (I don’t think I’m spelling that right but whatever). We went to the Batu caves and climbed 271 really steep steps and then some when we got inside ( I slipped and fell inside because it was wet, my butt’s blue… not fun) there were shrines inside and monkeys everywhere. They were kinda scary, they chased us. There were roosters and doves inside too… kinda random. Went up the KL tower, 5th tallest tower in the world I’m pretty sure. Cool view of the city and their twin towers. I got some sweet pics of those towers from the bottom too. We ate thai food that night, not a big fan, then checked out the night life. The night life was awesome. Turns out I stayed in the hotel that the club was at the next night. Everyone left in the morning so I took a taxi (or teksi as they write it) to the Cabana Inn and spent an hour waking up my lazy friend. We just wandered and ate some crappy American Chain food – pizza hut for lunch, TGI Fridays for dinner… SOOOOOOOOO GOOOD. I miss our food. I took a teksi by myself to the airport an hour away and hopped back on a plane to Penang the next morning. Did very little shopping and just got info about class registration and stuff before getting back on the boat. It might not sound like I did too much to get that “cultural experience” but after India I don’t know how NOT to enjoy every day. I’m so thankful for life and it’s just so humbling to be able to talk to people around the world and just share our views and get along. I’m happy ☺