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A reverse culture shock, arriving in Malaysia

Friday, January 18th, 2008

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We werent even planning on going to Malaysia until we decided we had seen enough of Africa and called our travel agency to change the date of our flight out of Africa.  We then  found out every flight to Bangkok was booked, so our only alternative was to fly somewhere else. The travel agent said he could get us to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia so we said, “sounds good, lets go” We quickly read up on Malaysia and were excited about the new country on our itinerary. When we arrived at the airport we were blown away by how nice everything was. Mind you, we had just spent two months in Africa, so a paved road seems pretty damn extravagant to us at this point. There was a monorail from the airport that jetted us off to the city centre and before we knew it we were at our hotel surrounded by huge skyscrapers. After traveling for 28 hours all we wanted was a bed and we were out before midnight. The next morning we woke up and Christy looked at her watch and almost freaked out. It was almost noon. We had slept for almost 12 hours! I guess we were pretty tired.

We read in the books that the food in Malaysia is some of the best in the world so we went straight to it and started what would be a 4 day eating binge in Kuala Lumpur. I am not joking, the food alone is worth going to Malaysia! They have what they call Hawker stands all over the city. These are basically little carts and each one specializes in a certain type of food or drink. One cart might have springrolls, the other cart has noodles, the next has freshly squeezed juices and so on. The stands will be lined up for a whole block and we would just walk, see something that looked good, eat it and continue on. It also doesn’t hurt that its sooo cheap. Most things cost between a quarter and fifty cents so you could eat all day for about 5-8 dollars a person. There were areas where it was mostly Indian dishes and then you would go to another area where there was Chinese and dim sum, a few blocks later you would be eating Thai food, and then some areas were just a crazy mixture of everything. If you like great food, and you like a good deal, you need to go to Malaysia.

Kuala Lumpu isn’t all about the food though.  There are great places to shop with one of the biggest outdoor Chinese markets in the country, tons of cute coffee and tea shops, the Patronas towers (not sure if I spelled that right), walking trails, butterfly farms, temples, etc.  The city was a definite highlight on our trip and to think we almost missed it!