Follow Me Around the World

Today I woke up early as usual.  I haven’t been able to sleep past eight thirty yet, early on.  I am officially over the jet lag, woohoo, because it sucked wanting desperately to go to sleep at three thirty or four p.m.

So I packed up all my stuff, took a much needed shower, and checked out of the hostel.  Luckily they let you hang around, and store your stuff, which is clutch because normally the hostels, once you check out, make you schlep your shit all around and don’t let you store it.  They even let me store it for free!  I started chatting with this girl Sarah who was from Scotland and just starting her trip around the world for a year.  It is a little difficult to understand the Scottish accent.  They speak extremely fast and many worlds are blurred together, or at least my ear was hearing blurred words.  We decided to do a little shopping and walk around.  She needed to get her camera fixed, because she dropped it like three weeks in to her trip and it hasn’t been working (and that sucks real bad, because I love taking pictures).  She read a posting at our hostel that some guy Louie in the Sim Lim Tower (electronics heaven), could maybe fix it, so our first journey was over to the Sim Lim Tower.  We got there and it was crazy, hundreds of stores in this huge building, and they basically are all the same.  We found the store Louie worked out, but he wasn’t there, he sent us to another place the “computer doctor,” and said that maybe he could fix it.  But before we hiked over there, we went to a few more shops.  One guy told us that the camera would cost a lot to be fixed (of course he wanted us to buy another one), and showed us two cameras.  Now these big places are tourist traps.  These dudes jack up the prices like up to 40% or more they say for the tourists, and even try to screw the locals.

The big scandal is giving tourists used electronics, different models, or ones that won’t work at all.  So he showed us a 12 mega pixel camera which I dont even think you can find in America or anywhere else really.  He wanted 180 SGD.  To Sarah that is about 90 Euros or 60 pounds, quite reasonable.  I even got him down to 150, but she wasn’t biting so we moved on.  Personally I might have bought the camera, people know me, when I need a camera or something I’ll just do it.  But she said that she wanted to wait to go to Australia (leaving today) and try and get it fixed.  If I was here for 60 or 45 pounds I would have bought the camera, got a cheap memory card and just went on.  Cause you can’t be bothered with not having a camera.

After walking around trying to find someone to fix her computer we decided to go to the famous Raffles Hotel.  This hotel is like 150 years old, used to be run by the British and is where the Singapore Sling was first made!  The Hotel and Bar was really cool, you could throw the peanut shells on the ground and just sit and enjoy.  They had really interesting paper made fans, and it was cool.  So we each got a Singapore Sling and chatted and ate and threw some peanut shells on the floor.

It was really nice, Sarah was a really cool girl, occupational therapist, finished school a few years back, worked and just saved up for this trip.  It was nice to again find some one else, from a different part of the world to spend a day with.  We tried to do some more shopping, I couldn’t find anything worth buying that I really wanted, so we just walked back to the hotel and now its 310PM and I have 6 more hours to kill before I have to go to the train station for my overnight train to Kuala Lumpur.  The weather today is a little shooty, looks like it might rain, so I am just chilling out, and probably going to get some good vendor food and head to Chinatown to buy some shirts and little things.  I have not bought a thing so far on day 6 and I am way under budget, which is nice considering I have extended for another month or so.  The tour will require me to get some more american money, which might be a little annoying because I only brought a certain amount for emergency and it turns out that I will have to dedicate it all to the visas and local payments and optional trips…So we will see what I will do.

So hopefully I will give you all an update from Kuala Lumpur in a day or so.

Thanks,

Josh

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 3:18 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.