Malaysia

Before this entry gets started I want to point out that I am currently in a hotel in Viet Nam with free internet. I spent a while tonight going through my blog and taking out bad pictures and putting in better quality ones. If you're intersted in seeing the nice ones you should go back and read my past entries.

I feel like this will be a boring enry. There isn't much I could explain about Malaysia. One little side note is that we had to tender to and from the ship every time we got on our off. This is a picture I took of the ship as I was hanging out of the tender boat. As for my time in Malaysia, I actually acted like a traditional American college student for once. I spent my days doing tourist things and my nights at bars and clubs. I had fun every day and every night. I signed up for a three day trip to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. Unfortunately I signed up for an SAS trip when I should have done it independently. The Semester at Sea trips are always WAY overpriced. It was a $340 trip or something and the people who did the trip independently paid maybe $50 per person for transportation and accommodations. I was not happy with that. I made the same mistake for Viet Nam but we'll get to that in my next entry. For the SAS trip, the guides took us to all different cultural sights in Malaysia. I am usually interested in that sort of thing but everything ended up being very boring. The best part of the SAS planned stuff was going to a firefly park. You couldn't take pictures because it would scare the fireflies away but it was a great experience. It was like entire trees were covered in blinking Christmas lights. One of the first stops we made was at the King's palace. There were guards in front and it kind of reminded me of the White House. We also went to the top of a building that looked kind of like the Seattle Space Needle. It was called the Kuala Lumpur Tower. They also had their own version of the Twin Towers. Nice architecture was all over Kuala Lumpur. I also went to see the world's largest mosque. I think it was the largest. It was definitely the largest in Malaysia but I'm not 100% if it was the largest in the world. The day we got back from KL, Kurt and I went up to Batu Ferrenghi to check out the night market. It's basically a long street with bootleg everything. I didn't really buy anything besides a little lamp thing. There were beaches all over but we didn't even go to any now that I think about it. Other than that I did a lot of dancing at clubs and met a lot of interesting people. One British guy, Ben, owned a bar that I was passing by late one night and he had about 10 of us come in and basically kept the bar open all night for us to hang out and have a good time. Most of the clubs had live bands and I noticed that pretty much every band at some point would play a song by The Cranberries. Random, I know. Kuala Lumpur was a blast and I recommend going there to anyone. There are plenty of places to relax but the nightlife offers a lot of excitement. There are also things like the butterfly garden, spice garden, botanical garden, and dozens more interesting sights in Penang. I only had time to see one and Kurt wanted to get spices so we went to the spice garden. Everything was out of season so it wasn't the right choice. There are huge malls and the clothing is very unique in all of them. I saw all of these sport jacket/hoodie fusions that I wanted but they didn't fit right so I never got one. After Malaysia we had a masquerade dance thing on the ship for Halloween. I think I might have been the person to come u with masquerade dance but it ended up just being a Halloween party... whatevs. I was a ninja. Random addition, this is my friend Kelsey and I playing airplane in the hall. She was dressed as Beatrix Kiddo from Kill Bill (Uma Thurman's character).Later on we were practicing a circus routine where she walks on my knee and onto my shoulders and arms. I don't have a picture of it but it we were getting good at it. At one point she fell and we got noise violations because a crew member was on the floor below us. It probably doesn't sound that funny but she asked us to explain to her what we were doing to make so much noise. My friend Bensen had been taking pictures so she took the camera to see for herself and looked at me like I was 2 years old. HAH! Good times.