Penang, Malaysia

Monday-Thursday, April 2-5, 2007

Malaysia is quite possibly one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited. When thinking beautiful, all of you probably think of Paradise Islands, and the Bahamas. But by beautiful, I mean the culture, the people, and the scenery. Malaysia, as an altogether whole was beyond gorgeous.

The first day we were in Malaysia I stayed in Penang. We went to a Buddhist temple and walked around. Buddhist temples may be my new favorite place to relax. The whole atmosphere was relaxing. The artwork in the temples is something that I can not describe, and while I have no yet looked through my pictures I just hope they captured even half of what I saw while in the temple. There was this golden Buddha in one of the rooms. When entering the room, it was required to take off your shoes. I literally spent upwards of about a half hour in this room just gazing up at the Buddha. I was amazing that such a large figure could stand so tall and that people would come in and just bow in front of it. Locals came into the temple periodically to offer giving's to the Buddha. They would just get one their knees and pray silently, not even caring that myself and my friends, the tourists, were in their temple taking pictures. I hope to go to another temple while in another country, but I do not know if time will permit, being that I currently have no plans in any other country except for Hong Kong and China.

Before going to the temple, my friends and I went to the local mall, which puts the Palisades Mall to shame! This mall was HUGE and contained every store you could think of in it. It is actually funny that while in all these other countries we can find basically anything that we need. But yea, so we went to the mall to walk around and get some food. We ended up at a Asian cuisine restaurant. It was a buffet, but not like any buffet that any of you would expect. Instead, the buffet contained raw chicken, meat, and fish. We were responsible for grabbing raw food and then going back to our table and cooking it on this grill-type mechanism. We had broth in the middle of the grill that we had to add vegetables to in order to make it taste better. The experience was great, and it was definitely another great meal in another country. I honestly have not had any food on this trip that I have no liked, everything is just amazing. Thank god I am not a picky eater, because a bunch of my friends have had problems finding food to eat.

The second day in Malaysia, we woke up early and took a 30 min flight from Penang to the capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. This city is one of the most magnificent things I have seen up to this part of the trip. It's funny, because up until this time I kept saying that Brazil and India were my two favorite ports with South Africa Right behind them. But I think that Malaysia is beating our both South Africa and India. Anyways, so we took a plane to Kuala Lumpur, then myself, and my friends Dan, Slava, and Greg, made our way to the hotel that we were staying at. We booked two rooms at a five star resort called Sunway Lagoon, and we stayed at the 4-star hotel at this resort. Later that night, 4 of our friends, Kyle, Sashia, Katie, and Natalie joined us at the hotel.

The hotel came equipped with a small city, a huge shopping mall, a water park (which was of the worst water parks I have ever been to), an adventure park (containing a rollercoaster), and an extreme park (containing ATVs, Go-Karts, and Paintballing). The complex was also located about 20 minutes outside of the city Kuala Lumpur. The first day we were there, we hung out in the hotel area, because it was basically a city in itself, then the second day we ventured out to Kuala Lumpur. When arriving in Kuala Lumpur, we first went to the PETRONAS Tower so that we could go up to the sky bridge and view the whole city of KL. The view from the sky bridge was beyond amazing. Also, while in KL we went to the Batu Caves. This was really cool, to get to the cave we first had to climb up 292 stairs. While on the stairs, there were a lot of wild monkeys, and while they were very cute, they were also thieves. At one point, a monkey stole a plastic bag out of the a local's hand. Upon taking the bag, the monkey ripped it open and out poured fruit and money. A stupid girl from SAS (yes, majority of the girls say stupid things) looked at me and asked, in all seriously, "I don't understand, why did the monkey steal the money? It's not like he can do anything with it!" I immediately looked at the girl and asked her "well maybe, did you consider, that the monkey smelled the fresh fruit that was in the bag?" I swear, some people are just stupid. But yea, anyways, the caves were really cool. It was basically a place in which offerings were offered to the various Gods of worship.

But yea, so that's basically it for Malaysia, off to Vietnam in three days. It is completely crazy! In just the month of April, I am going to be in Malaysia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Qingdao, and Japan… can anyone beat me? Haha miss you all!