Friday, April 13, 2012

Malaysia Vacation

I just got back from my trip to Malaysia! It was so great.  I was in Kuala Lumpur for 3 days and then in Penang for 3 days.  I traveled to Kuala Lumpur with my friends Gilbert, Les, and Gilbert's friend Johnny and they were all great to travel with.  We went to the symphony, the mall (it felt like America in there!), and the Batu Caves.  It was really fun. Then I traveled by myself to Penang which is an island. It was interesting to travel by myself outside of Cambodia for the first time. It was a little stressful but ultimately is was a really good experience for me. I met a really nice girl at the hostel in Kuala Lumpur and then met up with her again in Penang.  She was great to do things with and we walked around all of the Georgetown area of Penang and saw all the colonial buildings and Fort Cornwallis.  We also ate AMAZING food. They have a lot of Chinese food and Indian food and I was staying in a hostel really close to both Chinatown and Little India.  When we were in Kuala Lumpur we ate a lot of Western food and we had to get our fix of McDonald's but when I was in Penang I really wanted to eat local food and I'm so glad I did.

The first thing I noticed about Malaysia is the diversity there. There are girls in short shorts and there are girls wearing headscarves and there are Muslims and Christians and Hindus and Indians, and Chinese, and Westerners, every different type of person you could imagine was represented. It was great to see. Cambodia is so homogeneous so going to a place where there are so many different types of people was really awesome.

Two really crazy things happened to me while I was traveling though. First, a girl got mugged right outside of my guesthouse. I heard screaming and then two girls from Whales came in and one had her purse stolen by a guy on a moto.  This girl grabbed onto the front of the moto to get her purse back and was dragged down the street a little ways.  She came in the guest house bruised and scraped up.  It was pretty bad. But she got her bag back with all her stuff still inside of it so her injuries weren't for nothing. And they caught the guy who did it right down the street.  The police came and they wanted the girls to go to the police station to fill out a report but they were really shaken and scared to go so they asked me to come with them. I was shocked, but of course I said yes.  So here I am, at 3am, riding in the back of a Malaysian cop car with the sirens blaring going 100 miles an hour through the streets of Kuala Lumpur.  It was a pretty interesting experience. I waited at the police station for them to fill out their report and then we went back to the guest house.  It was a very exciting night.

The second thing that happened to me was the earthquake.  The day before I was leaving to come back to Cambodia there was an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra and we felt it in Penang.  My whole bunk bed was shaking and I didn't know what it was at first until someone told me it was an earthquake later. They issued a tsunami warning and they closed the bridge off the island for a while but later in the evening they lifted all the warnings and reopened the bridge. No harm done. It was just an exciting experience.  I love natural disasters and I think they are so interesting so it was nice to finally get to experience one.

So that was my trip in a nutshell. I love traveling but I'm so glad to be back home in Cambodia.  It was weird because I couldn't wait to get out of the third world but once I got away from Cambodia I realized how much I missed it.  I finally realized and accepted the fact that Cambodia is my home now.  And it's really nice to be in a place where you know what's going on, you can converse with everyone, you know how to get around easily, and you know exactly what to expect.

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