Malaysia - Penang

We went to Penang because we heard it was a great place to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but when we were there, it was totally dead. Maybe the parades and dragon dances and fireworks happen some other time, or maybe they don't happen at all, we'll never know. Even though Chinatown was shut up, everywhere else was open so we spent most of our time over in Little India. The transition between neighborhoods was hilarious. You would cross a certain street and it would go from the quiet, breezy calm of Chinatown to an explosion of people, sound and smell in Little India. Tons of people out in the streets, everything was open, and every other shop was blaring Indian pop music. Instead of spending our time in a street party, like we thought, we ended up seeing a lot of sites: walking all over town checking out the different temples, going up to Penang Hill and then engaging in a ridiculously steep (from 800m to sea level over 5km) hike down to the botanical gardens and lots of eating. Luckily all the hawker stalls were open, so we had tons of satay, a tom yum soup so hot it was deliciously painful and various indian feasts. Malaysia is an amazing food country, incorporating the best of chinese, indian, malay and other southeast asian countries (notably Thailand), and it's all super cheap. We were eating good meals for MYR10 (about $3) and had an enormous indian dinner with way too much incredible food for MYR20 ($6). It seems like other SE Asian countries get more tourist love, but Malaysia was fantastic.

Abby in the archway of the Chow Yun Fat mansion. Used to belong to a rich Chinese merchant, now a hotel that you can also take tours of. Expensive tours, so we just admired the outside...

Indian temple

The outside of the Kek Lok Si temple, supposedly the biggest Buddhist temple in SE Asia. Leading up to the temple was the traditional t-shirt and other assorted junk hawker hallway.

There was a writhing pond full of turtles in the temple, for some reason.

There were Buddha statues everywhere inside the temple, of all shapes and sizes.

A view out over the city of Georgetown from about halfway up the temple.

We didn't take this picture, it's from wikipedia, but this was going on while we were there. They only light up the temple during Chinese New Year, which is 15-20 days long.

They also have great fruit in Malaysia, but unlike in the Philippines, they actually eat it! You could buy fresh fruit and packets of sliced fresh fruit everywhere, even late at night.

There were a lot of monkeys on the hike down from Penang Hill to the botanical gardens.

There were also a lot of monkeys in the gardens, but unfortunately there were also hordes of tour bus tourists feeding them. This guy just opened his brothers mouth and helped himself.

We also visited a Burmese Buddhist temple which was really beautifully done.

This reclining Buddha is the third largest in the world! Or maybe Asia! I'm not really sure, but that's one big enlightened being!

A shot inside another Buddhist temple. There were a lot of people praying in all of the temples we visited. I'm not sure if that's normal, or if it had something to do with CNY...

Malaysia - Singapore and KL

Singapore might have been the highlight of the trip for me. I was wondering while I was there if everything seemed so amazing because it actually was amazing, or if my take on things is a little skewed because I've been living in a little town in the Philippines for two years, taking cold showers out of a bucket. I didn't come up with an answer, but I'm still pretty convinced Singapore is freakin' amazing. Much like Malaysia, Singapore is mostly made up of Malay, Chinese and Indian, with a pretty good sized ex-pat community and apparently millions of white babies, all being pushed around in strollers. What the hell was up with all the white babies? The city was sparklingly clean, well planned out, had amazing public transportation and green everywhere. Open spaces, parks, trees... I think I'm a little too easily impressed at this point. It was definitely a taste of the 1st world, since Singapore is a pretty rich country. Income-wise they rank in the teens worldwide, above countries like Germany and France, so there were lots of nice cars, well dressed people and the like, kind of an Southeast Asia-lite.The food was top-notch, just like Malaysia, and the beer expensive. They also have a lot of laws that they enforce, including a weird one about chewing gum. Apparently you can get fined for having it, as it is illegal, to which I say right on because if I sit on one more piece of gum, I'm going to bomb Wrigley and blame it on terrorists.

This is a hawker stall area in Singapore. There are maybe 40-50 different places to chose from here, each one with something different(ish). It's kind of like if a mall food court didn't suck, but instead was full of amazing, cheap food, and wasn't in the mall.

Why can't everywhere be full of roast duck?

Having a beer at the boat quay, waiting for the museum to be free (Fri night from 7pm-9pm).

Top of an Indian temple

There was something going on at the temple while we were there, so as the parents talked the kids roamed free...

Temple of 1000 Lights

Renovated Chinese shop houses in Chinatown, now selling really expensive clothing.

Amazing temple door art

We ended up staying in the Muslim area (called Kampong Glam), which was probably my favorite part of town, and home to great middle eastern food.

Singapore had a great botanical garden, but it was free and open from 5am - midnight, so it was more like a city park. Never the less it was huge, and beautiful, and quiet. Ah, quiet.

The best part of the park was the orchid garden. I am by no means a flower nerd, but they were pretty spectacular.

Happy 2008, the sequel

Abby's out of the hospital now, no more dengue. She's still pretty weak and gets tired really easily, but most of the symptoms are gone, which is a good thing because dengue, apparently, is not fun to have. Go figure. So now we're just stuck in Manila for a week while they monitor her. We have PC Washington to thank for that. It's not that I hate Manila, I just don't really like it that much. It's fun when there are people in town, you're healthy, and you're here for short periods of time. I just hate getting stuck here when Abby's sick, there's nothing to do and there's no where to go. I guess any city would suck if that were the case though. On top of it all, they are only playing pinoy movies in all the theaters for some reason, so we can't even go see a movie!

Abby's parents came for a visit, as I mentioned, which was a lot of fun. Last Christmas was just me (sick), Abby and our friend Carrie, so it wasn't really much of an event. Plus it was our first Christmas here in the Philippines so we were still being thrown off by the lack of Christmas hoo-ha, the annoying Christmas music (luckily, this year, no Boom-Tarat-Tarat!) and the fact that it was 85 degrees outside. So this year we were used to the whole scene, plus we had family in town, and a lot of friends came over for Christmas day feasting, so the whole day had the air of something other than just another day. I could really care less now about the gift-giving aspect of Christmas, but I'm a sucker for a big celebration, so it was nice that we could have that this year.

The first two day they were here we took them around Manila a little bit, went to everyone's favorite stinky shopping area, Quiapo, went on a walking tour of part of Manila that included a lot of Imelda Marcos info, and enjoyed being ensconced in the Pan Pacific. After that we all bundled on the death rocket that passes for a bus here and hurtled off to Puerto Galera for a night, in order to show them around our favorite little spots and break up the trip a little bit. Then we went to site for 3 days, as I mentioned, which was really cool because they got to see our town, our market, and how we live our lives here. After that is was back to unreality as we travelled down to Boracay and stayed in a nice resort, ate pretty good food and lounged on the beach. I have to say, it's amazing what a difference a year makes. It's not that Boracay wasn't really nice, but I was much less blown away this year. I think a lot of that had to do with being wowed by the selection of western food last year, and this year it was a lot less impressive. Anyway, Abby got the deng, we came back to Manila, the end.

2008

Happy New Years everyone, Abby's parents came for a visit, it was a lot of fun. Now she's in the hospital with dengue. But she's ok! I'm out of time at the internet cafe, more later!