Putting on my sparkly Toms (the fanciest shoes I own) and a silly hat and going out to Hongdae tonight. Here’s some shaky-as-hell videos of the magical street parade I witnessed.

Part One: Loud drums and miscellany

Part Two: RAM ROK – the leveling up of a coconut man

Part Three: what is going on there is so much happening oh and look the camera is sideways.

Part Four: the dénouement

Handy-dandy index of the gazillion Malaysia-related posts I made yesterday:
Malaysia: My New Favorite Country
Langkawi: a Beach Bum’s Paradise
Our Adventures with the Non-fighting Irish
Our Adventures with the Non-fighting Irish, part 2
On Traffic and Spaniards
On Watermelons and Gods

(This is seriously more posts than I usually make in six months. My eyes are kind of fuzzy from staring at the screen all day.)

I’ll say it again: I loved Malaysia. Like with the Philippines, as soon as I landed, I felt smiles and warmth all around. I think it’s the tropical clime cultures – it’s easy to smile when the weather is good, and food just falls from the trees.

Oh, but the eatin’ was good:

My favorite breakfast banana leaf curry stall. You choose what you want, and they wrap it up with rice in a big banana leaf as a handy takeaway container.

Eating the contest of a breakfast banana leaf on the patio of our first hostel, listening to jungle birds.

More banana leaf action. It's a beautiful substitute for a plate.

At a food stall in Little India. Simple but fantastic.

Meat on a stick: the Malaysia variant.

At a food court in Melaka Sentral station. That's a curried fish with greens and rice.

More takeaway, wrapped in a triangle. Left: spicy noodles, right: fried sweet potato.

Curried prawn soup. Almost everything I had was curried, now that I look back, but all tasted different, with complex flavor profiles of varying sweetness, heat, and depth.

Roti and fish curry in the morning. Why were people going into McDonald's?

At an open air food court in the old school Malay neighborhood near Kampung Baru station. Hardly anyone here spoke English and I think I was the only tourist. It was a bit of a trial ordering food, but it was so worth it.

The fish that the man was grilling in the previous photo. I still have no idea what fish that was. Possibly stingray? It had a soft, almost gelatinous texture, but wasn't too unctuous.

Last meal from Jalan Alor, before I had to dash through the rain to catch the monorail. Note to future self: green curried crab, while delicious, is maybe NOT the best dish to order when you have only five minutes in which to eat!

As you can see, gorging senselessly on food was the highlight of this trip. My sister and brother-in-law gave me a food stipend for Malaysia as a Christmas gift, and I certainly put it to good use.

At Merdeka Square.

My recommendation to travelers visiting Kuala Lumpur is to just go with the flow. Don’t get too obsessed with checking off the tourist destinations; I found them to be all right but by no means the best thing about the city. Go where the people go. Eat where the locals eat. The city is eclectic and ever-changing; in addition to the incredible parade I’d posted about, I also caught a glimpse of a street graffiti festival and a protest against an Australian rare earth minerals plant, within a short span of time. Allow yourself to get swept up in the madness.

The one thing on those tourist lists you should definitely be sure to visit, however, is this:

Jalan Alor: how I dream of thee! Such a little street, packed with so many things to eat.

Now I need to go run off this portly food baby I acquired while in Malaysia. Back to the grind!

By the riverside in Melaka.

I parted ways with Twinkles, and then suddenly found myself at a loss without a travel buddy. I’ve been accustomed to having somebody around on my travels – Eli, friends, relatives, etc. This was the first time I found myself totally alone in a new country. I wandered around a bit before going back to the hostel to cool off.

As soon as I walked in, the owner, a Malay guy named Patrick, introduced himself. Second thing he said to me: “do you drink?”

“Why, yes.”

“Then come out with us later! We’re meeting up to go to an indie bar around ten.”

Yes! I found my people, without even trying.

I ran out to go get a bowl of curry from my favorite little eat street, Jalan Alor, and on my way back, suddenly this very large and imposing dude, who looked like some sort of Nubian prince, fell into stride with me. “You are very beautiful.” Eep! He was a Saudi businessman, and he was approximately ninety feet tall. He wouldn’t leave my side until he managed to score a scrap of paper and write his phone number down for me, which I accepted with a meek Midwestern “thanks!” and scurried off. In retrospect, he was quite gentlemanly; nevertheless I wasn’t terribly interested in becoming this dude’s fourth wife or whatever.

I went back to the hostel and met up with the other people, and we eventually went out for drinks, danced, and had a great time. Afterwards, we went back to the hostel, where Patrick and some of the other guests had prepared a vodka watermelon: basically, they’d cut a hole into a watermelon and poured as much vodka as could fit, and then let it soak for hours. In my opinion, they’d ruined a perfectly good watermelon, but I ate it anyways and got a little bit way trashed off it.

The next morning, my last in KL, I had planned to get up early and see the Batu Caves: the last remaining major tourist destination on all those top 10 “Things to See in KL” sites. The effects of the watermelon significantly delayed things, and I didn’t end up getting out of the hostel until around 11:00.

I spotted that the monorail hadn’t left yet and dashed on, thinking I’d just caught it. The doors remained open, however, and it was just sitting there. “Attention monorail passengers: we apologize for the slight delay.” No biggie, I was in no huge rush, since the Batu Caves would apparently only take a few hours and I still had a full day to fill. Eventually the monorail moved on to the next station and broke down again, sitting there so long that most of the other passengers had given up in disgust, and I was able to find a seat.

An hour passed. Usually, by this point, I would have bailed. For some reason, possibly watermelon-related, I decided to just stay and wait it out, and maybe doze a little on the monorail. The other option would have been to roam around Bukit Bintang, my hostel’s neighborhood, and I’d already done quite a bit of that in the past few days. Plus, I’d paid a whole 2 ringits (less than $1) for the monorail fare, dammit, and I wasn’t just going to lose that.

Eventually the monorail got up and running again, and what would ordinarily be a 15 minute ride ended up turning into a two hour journey. I woke up from my nap and happened to look up just as the monorail was pulling into KL Sentral, the central hub where I would have to switch to get to the Caves, and saw through the window that there was a massive street parade happening. ! The Caves could wait; I had to catch that parade. I booked it off the monorail and ran around the street, trying to catch up. I caught a trail of crumpled papers, incense and ashes, and followed it right to the most incredible spectacle I have ever witnessed in my entire life.

I tried to snap photos and I even have some video which I’ll get around to editing at some point, but these hardly do it justice. At any given moment there were at least eight amazing things happening, so it was hard to know what to focus on. There’d be a guy with coconuts hanging from hooks off his back, smoking a cigar and swigging a beer while a woman in a jeweled sari washed his gnarled feet with brilliant yellow turmeric water. Or there’d be another guy, pulling the man behind him with strings that were attached to the first man’s back with deep hooks. There was a dude in Geisha makeup, sucking a pacifier. There was a deafening drum circle. There were always these dudes in strange dress trying to…I don’t know, maybe level up? with all these spectators cheering them on. There was a Chinese dragon dance. There were fireworks. There were women with long silky hair, interwoven with bright flowers. There was chaos.

One of the coconut men.

It's hard to tell from this picture, but the man in the center was alternately pulling and being pulled by the guy behind him with those ropes. The ropes were secured to his back with hooks. It looked QUITE painful and there were all these deep gashes in his back.

The colors were so vibrant, especially the yellows.

They used this turmeric water for washing feet, and also for washing the streets.

I really feel like this picture embodies the essence of Kuala Lumpur.

Squaring off in some kind of leveling-up dance. Like how technical I'm getting with the detail?

In the aftermath of the parade; a lot of coconuts got smashed.

It was the craziest and best thing that I’ve ever experienced firsthand. I felt like I was transported to India, by way of China. The neat and very Malaysian thing about it was that it was a perfect melding of all these disparate cultures. The sun was baking the top layer of my head off, I was dizzy from the loud chanting and the fireworks and smells of turmeric and incense, and I was soaked in sweat and also some of the turmeric water that flowed freely down the street. Maybe that’s what it takes to get a lifelong atheist to be a little contemplative about god(s). I did feel blessed, that it was extremely fortuitous that I managed to come here at the right time, of all places. If I hadn’t been late, if the monorail hadn’t broken down and if I hadn’t just decided to stick it out, I would have missed this. It was truly a series of serendipitous occurrences that led me to this magical experience.

All thanks to this watermelon:

I had been curious about this fragrant Thai place right next to the hostel, but the businessmen – one of whom was Indian, I believe, and the other Bengali – took one look at the place and politely suggested, “how about another place?” We ended up going to an Indian restaurant across the street. Had various curries on a banana leaf, which were all right, but the ordering process was so confusing that I didn’t quite end up with what I had wanted, and what I did end up getting wasn’t that impressive. Still, the businessmen footed the bill, so that bit was nice.

They asked us what we did, and we said we were English teachers in Korea (just like any other American they would encounter in Southeast Asia, basically). Then I asked what they did, and the Indian guy paused a bit before he said, “We’re headhunters.” That rang a bell in my head dimly, somewhere, but conscious me didn’t really quite understand until he elaborated further, with business jargon and such. “We’re in the business of importing a labor force from other countries, principally the Philippines, to supply Malaysian companies with a much-needed work force. You see, there’s a labor shortage here, especially in construction and domestic household care…” and so on and so forth. Huh.

I tried to figure out how to phrase good questions, but sadly I’m no journalist. At one point, the Bengali guy chimed in, maybe because he saw the worried look on my face, and said, “of course we’re not wanting any of these workers to be exploited or anything.”

“Oh, so do you have any mechanisms in place to check that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, do you follow up with the companies and make sure the workers are being treated fairly?”

“Oh, no, we don’t do any of that.” They simply recruit in the home country, do the paperwork and bring the workers over, and hand them off to the company. After that, the workers aren’t their responsibility anymore. I thought back to all the articles I’ve read on human trafficking, and wondered, “is this how it really happens?” I’m usually a realist, but I guess for some reason I always just assumed that there was always some kind of Bond villain involved in such cases, cackling to himself about the gullible poors he’d duped and enslaved, while petting a fluffy white cat or something. Even so, I’m reluctant to stick these dudes with the potential label of “traffickers,” purely for this dumb reason: they were so nice. I couldn’t see these guys seizing people’s passports and telling them they owed billions of US dollars in contractual fees that they needed to pay off. But of course they wouldn’t be doing that, if it even happened. It would be somebody at the company who hired these guys to bring the workers over. Maybe not even the company itself, but a third party whose specialization is processing foreign workers.

That’s the key, I’m starting to think – exploitation occurs when you get lots of people together from different transnational companies, whose principal goal is to make profit, and who are strongly incentivized to pass the responsibility of human care and rights to someone else. It’s not any one person’s actions, perhaps, so much as an entire habitat of shit.

Anyway, these guys really were very pleasant to talk to, and we got a free lunch out of it. And something to think about.

The High Maintenance Spaniards

Twinkles and I were in the crazed mess that is the Kuala Lumpur Chinatown, weaving through streams of people and stalls full of knockoff handbags, sunglasses, stupid T-shirts, etc. I stopped at a stall to pick up a stupid T-shirt for Eli, and engaged in the haggling process.

So I’m haggling for this T-shirt, while a Spanish couple comes up, admiring my haggling technique. I buy the shirt, and we chat for a bit. They seemed pleasant and friendly, and as always when traveling, I am excited to meet new people – we’d parted ways with the Irish couple earlier, and were looking for replacements, I suppose.

Though these Spaniards weren’t exactly as pleasant as the Irish couple had been. We started to see signs of this at the beginning, and as the night went on it became increasingly apparent that they would not be good replacements for the Irish. I’ll call them Daniel and Graciela. Daniel asked me where we were from, and when I replied “we’re Americans,” he said, “oh, then I bet you can’t find Spain on a map.” What the hell, dude. Spain is like the easiest European country, barring Italy, to find. I protested as such, and then of course Twinkles chimed in and admitted that she didn’t know where Spain was. “Is it near France?” Dammit, Twinkles! Keep your geography deficiencies under wraps around judgy Europeans!

We kept chatting, and I proposed we sit down – instead of blocking the busy thoroughfare with our chitchat – and grab a beer. We went over to one of the food stalls and grabbed a beer, and immediately they complained about how expensive it is. “Well, it is a Muslim country,” I pointed out. We learned more of their story. They had just taken jobs in China, which meant that they were more accustomed to Chinese prices. As I mentioned before, Malaysia is quite expensive compared to places like China and other Southeast Asian countries. They seemed pretty friendly and interesting, and we talked for about about the different places we’d been, life in China vs. life in Korea, etc. We discussed travel plans, and mentioned that we were headed down to the town of Melaka the next day. They talked about maybe joining us.

A woman came up to check and see if we needed anything, and Graciela began to try and converse with her in Chinese. The woman was having problems understanding; she might not even have been Chinese, but a Malay or a Nepalese person who happened to be on staff there. Anyway, the Spaniards were getting frustrated, and though their Spanish was way too fast and accented for me to pick up, my having retained so little of the six years of Spanish classes I’d taken (yes, that is pretty sad), I did hear Daniel refer to the lady as a “puta china.” I blinked and said nothing, but maybe had a little bit of stinkface, and so Daniel noticed that I had caught what he’d said.

“Why’d you call her that?”

“Oh, I just said that because I didn’t think anyone here would understand.”

O…kay. He then proceeded to explain that he likes to use lots of vulgar language, which is all very well and fine (I have friends who can’t go more than a sentence without cursing), but it seems a lot more mean-spirited if you’re cursing someone in a language they don’t understand. At least have the balls to straight up say, “look, lady, you’re being a total twat-waffle,” in terms she could understand.

I guess that was the second big warning flag. It’s hard to say why, but despite previous weirdness, we decided to go out with them to a Second Location. Another travel tip: never go with a grouchy Spaniard to a Second Location. We split a cab to our area of town, which is full of clubs and bars and things (it’s a tourist area, so it caters to non-Muslims). They grumbled about the cab fare, which split four-ways ended up being less than $2 USD each, and then, when we walked into the club, Daniel grumbled about the fact that nobody appeared to be dancing at, like, 10:30.

Twinkles went to the restroom. I ordered a drink, which was quite expensive – again, Muslim country, don’t come here for the booze! After I ordered, I accidentally returned the menu to the waiter instead of giving it to Daniel, which he then grumbled about. Oops. He walked over to the bar, and then proceeded to get in an argument with the bartender, because apparently they were trying to charge him more than what was listed in the menu. Yes, that was a shitty thing to do, but the way he reacted just seemed so heated (these Spanish tempers!) He yelled at the bartender, who offered him another drink, which was refused – “I’m leaving.” I dashed into the bathroom to gather Twinkles, and we left.

Walked over to another club – again, nobody was dancing, as it was still a little early. Daniel seemed strangely bothered by this, even though from what I’ve heard of going out in Spain, don’t people typically start late and go dancing till the wee hours of the morning? Maybe my Spain info is inaccurate. “Why don’t we just grab a beer, chill out and wait?” I suggested, so we walked over to a nearby restaurant – oddly enough, the same restaurant we’d eaten at with the maybe-traffickers. Graciela noticed a promotional poster for a sale on the wall: get three beers for the price of one. We double checked with the wait staff, and that particular promotional was not in effect. “Then why you put the poster on the wall?” demanded Graciela, and soon she got in a verbal scrap with the waiter, and we had to leave that place.

Oh, boy. These guys were not chill at all – they were both high-maintenance AND cheap, which is truly the worst combination. High-maintenance people with expensive tastes at least want to do something, instead of shooting down every possible avenue of action. The Spaniards wanted to drink but were grumbling at the prices (which, by European and U.S. standards, were still on the cheap end), they wanted to dance but were grumbling at having to wait for the people to show up, and they ruled out every other possibility including just sitting and chatting, which is free.

I looked over at Twinkles, who, to my horror, was bringing up the Melaka trip again. “Only if you guys want to!” I said, waving my hands, looking a little maniacal and maybe a little too obviously hinting that they should not in fact go, but I was no mood to have my trip ruined by these Negativos.

We walked by another club, which unlike the other two was packed, and both Graciela and Twinkles still seemed to want to try and party. But Daniel was still fed up about the bait-and-switch drink prices – “I hate Kuala Lumpur!”, and I finally realized just how genuinely taxing it was to be around them, so we parted ways.

After they left, I turned to Twinkles and said, “You know what? I’d rather go with human traffickers to a Second Location, instead of traveling with those guys. Yikes.”

Expecto Petronas! Yes, I seriously did just write that. Shut up.

On many of the Top 10 Lists of Things to Do in Kuala Lumpur, the various towers around the city feature prominently. There are the twin Petronas Towers (which Ron and I joked about, being Harry Potter nerds), and the Menara Tower, which kind of looks like Namsan Tower in Seoul, which sorta resembles the Space Needle in Seattle, and so forth. When I read over those lists, my eyes just sort of skipped past these items, because really? I do not care about towers. They are invariably tall, shiny, and pointy. Sometimes they provide visitors a nice view from the top, and other times, there is smog. I certainly had very little interest in paying for what amounts to an extended elevator ride, and a view that looks much better in postcard format. But Ron and Kelly were super jazzed about these towers, for some reason, and when I think about it, this makes sense: how many towers are there in Ireland? Probably a few tallish broken ye olde castle ruins, manned by leprechauns.

Okay, this view was actually kind of cool. The city is a mix of skyscrapers and jungle bursting through the urban landscape.

The tower was that – yeah, a tower! – but the company was nice, so we chatted for awhile about movies and TV. Ron and Kelly have seen every American TV show and movie, and I was again bummed that Eli couldn’t be there on the trip because he could actually keep up with them. (I have the worst TV and movie literacy of anyone I know). Turns out that Ron’s friends are actually extras in the excellent HBO series “Game of Thrones,” which I have seen (and of course absolutely love – season 2 is coming, yay) and he’s hoping to try out as an extra for season 3. So we did some dorking out about that, and also about “The Wire.” (Best TV show ever – really, it’s kind of put me off investing in other TV shows; that’s my excuse, anyhow).

We eventually descended from the tower, and talked of grabbing dinner and moving on. “But wait,” said Twinkles, “we have to do our pony ride!” Oh, right. How could we have forgotten?!

Another thing I am not a fan of is horses. There’s something a little creepy about them, they bite if you get too close, and if you’re riding one and he gets spooked out, he’ll just throw you off. I will ride ponies, though I am not thrilled about it. I rode a pony once when I was little, maybe 7 or so, and I remember thinking it kind of “meh” even then.

We went out to the parking lot to find these ponies waiting for us. They looked so displeased with their situation in life. When we approached, one of the ponies raised his head to stare at us accusingly: “really? Are you seriously going to ride me, and you are over the age of two? Assholes.” We put on helmets – HELMETS! – and mounted our fine steeds.

There are many points to a pony, but none of them gives a shit. Not even the ass.

“So where are we going?” asked Twinkles.

“Oh, just around here,” said the worker.

Ron and Kelly were beside themselves with laughter throughout the whole five minutes, no doubt due to sheer jealousy. It was the best mandatory pony ride ever.

Notice how everyone involved is just so thrilled that this pony ride is happening.

Part 1: The Reggae Rat House
We found out that we were all going to be in KL for a night, so we made plans to meet up again there, somewhere in the Chinatown district. Twinkles and I did our fishing trip, I rolled my ankle, and then we flew back to KL. By the time the flight was done, I was limping – I hadn’t realized it, but I’d also gotten a nice gash on the underside of my toe as a souvenir. I am very insensible to pain (and taking proper care of my body) so I just decided to ignore it and go ahead to Chinatown.

We eventually met up with Ron and Kelly, and had a few drinks at a place called “Reggae Bar.” Reggae Bar is also part of a series of “Reggae” named establishments – they run a hostel, some higher end guest houses, etc. It’s the cheapest place in KL, a predominantly Muslim city, to get drinks. We sat around outside, drinking, having a good time, and Ron mentioned that usually they have pretty dire luck with places that have “Reggae” in the name. “But this place is actually quite nice,” he said. Cue soundtrack of foreboding.

I looked around and noticed that a few of the customers were smoking shisha (what many call “hookah,” or “narghile” if you’re in Lebanon). Feeling wistful for that first night in KL, I asked if they would be interested in getting a shisha. “Sure!” We ordered one and were smoking it, but it wasn’t quite as smooth and nice as the first night. Still, it was fine, right up until a drunk girl tottered out of the bar and crashed directly into the shisha, dumping the coals ALL OVER Twinkles’ lap. Twinkles was wearing shorts at the time, too, so it was directly on her bare skin. We were in shock, trying to get the coals off her, and I had to tell a waiter, who was busy trying to sweep the coals off the ground, to please get some ice because hello? My friend just got burned?

The drunk girl was far too trashed to apologize, but there was no such excuse for the others in her party, none of whom came over to say sorry. There was a guy over there, standing around like a dope, on his cell phone. Ron – remember, he’s Irish – was fuming, pondering going over there and socking the guy in the face. This other Irish couple (we ran into a lot of Irish while traveling through Malaysia, oddly enough) at another table said “it’s not worth it, don’t do it” and Ron was able to calm down and think rationally. Another travel tip: Starting fights can get you jail time in Malaysia.

We were still in shock and recovering from what had just happened, and the sheer rudeness of the girl and her party, when the manager came out and announced that the patio area was closed, and we had to move inside. Annoyed, I asked a worker to move the shisha that, you know, had just injured Twinkles. We got inside, where there was loud music and lots of people trying to dance, and I was nervous about the shisha tipping over again. We all had maybe one more puff of shisha each, before the manager comes out again and told us to go. “Bar closed! Finish your drinks and get out.”

Credit to "cidaq" at deviant art for such a nicely seedy picture.

Twinkles, oddly enough, was very calm and collected about just having been scorched and treated as subhuman by just about everybody for the last ten minutes. Then she looked down and squealed, “Ohmygod I just saw a rat, we need to get out of here.” A big fat grey specimen was darting into the establishment. It was probably the nicest creature there.

The sun setting on heaven.

Langkawi is solidly in column B. My time there was very reminiscent of my time in the Philippines, though with slightly less dramatically gorgeous scenery (through no fault of its own; it is hard business competing with places like El Nido and Coron). The water was warm, the sand soft and white, the people leathery and tan from the golden sun. I got some great snorkeling time:

Obligatory "finding Nemo" reference.

Stalking pretty fish with this fancy underwater camera.

Almost forgot to mention that there were sharks in these waters. Quite a lot of them. The people were feeding them. Sharks!

This photo's wonky perspective makes me look like I have some kind of monster elephantiasis of the left hand and the squattest torso ever. The fish looks about the right size, though.

Twinkles and I went on a fishing trip with Sam and a few other guests at the hostel. I’d never been fishing before in my life, but on that outing I caught 11 fish! (well, nine, really, if you discount the two that were roughly the same size as the bait I’d used).
When we were done fishing, we landed at a beach while the captain and workers grilled the fish we had caught. Being lazy, the rest of us swam around and laid out on the sand. I can now finally declare myself a swimmer, thanks to Twinkles’ assistance. Eli had worked with me on floating during the Philippines trip, so I tried to remember how to do that again this time. Then I got the courage to move my arms and legs while floating, and suddenly I was doing something like the backstroke. A real swimming move, not used by dogs! I’m still no Michael Phelps or anything, but that’s one more thing I can check off the list of Things I Need to Learn. Along with fishing, I suppose.

The fish was simply prepared – gutted, put on a stick and grilled over an open flame. They hadn’t added any seasoning at all, it was all the work of Mother Nature: ocean salt, whale piss, and what-have-you. It was really flavorful and took on extra richness from the smoke.

Grilling the fish, old school.

Almost meal time! Yes, that'll be our Captain No Pants in the background.

Next post: the return to Kuala Lumpur and the Reggae Rat House.

As you might surmise from the title, I really, really, really enjoyed Malaysia. Out of all the countries I’ve been to thus far, Malaysia has been the most diverse. I’ve been to places with lots of diversity and all, but none with quite such a successful melting pot like that of Malaysia – Chinese, Indian, ethnic Malay, Thai, all living, working, and eating side by side. The mix is apparent in the food itself, which has influences from those four types of cuisines and more. Throw in all sorts of other nationalities converging on Malaysia for business reasons, and you’ve got this chaotic – yet surprisingly peaceful – mix.

I traveled there with my friend Twinkles, another foreign teacher in my area. We call her Twinkles because she is always wearing heels and is twinkle-toed, lagging behind the rest of us on expeditions. She’d never been in a hostel before, always having stayed at hotels, and she’d also never been to another country besides Korea. Twinkles turned out to be a great travel buddy, always up for new things even if they were a bit uncomfortable. She also always asked for directions, which is something I am reluctant to do. (It’s not just a stereotypical dude thing! Us ladies can also be dude-headed and overly confident in our meagre navigation skills). Since she has kept up so well on this trip, we’ll maybe have to reconsider “Twinkles” and rechristen her “Sprinty” or “Explorer Woman” or something.

Our itinerary: we had only a week or so, which we spent in Peninsular Malaysia. We stayed in Kuala Lumpur for a night, then boarded a plane to Langkawi to soak up some beach time. Then it was back to KL, and we made a very quick jaunt down to Melaka to look at some historic buildings before jetting back up to KL.

An idiot's guide to the places me and my friends visited.

The very best little eat street in Kuala Lumpur.

There, we had my favorite meal of the trip, deep fried salt and pepper prawns, and crab in a black pepper sauce that was so good I actually moaned, something I never do on principle because it’s just too cheesy. (Later, Twinkles and I were hanging out with an Irish couple, and I took them back to this place to have the exact same meal again, and it was just as good the second time. The Irish guy declared that it was the nicest seafood he’d ever had. Go me and my food instincts!)

I'm a bad blogger and didn't think to photograph the meal until after we'd mostly devoured it. It was a messy affair but so. good.

Smoking out of a pineapple! This was a first for me.

Before this trip, I’d heard from a number of friends, who had traveled to Malaysia and loved the rest of the country, to “get out of KL as soon as possible.” Even Adventurous Kate seemed to dislike the city, so I’d had some trepidations. All those were erased that first night. I love Kuala Lumpur, even though on the face of it, it doesn’t seem like it would be my kind of city. I’m not at all into shopping malls and towers, which comprise most of the official tourist attractions. In fact, those were my least favorite parts of KL. The times I fell in love with the city were times when we were exploring different neighborhoods and either 1) eating something delicious or 2) happening upon something completely strange. It’s a great place to wander. We had some fantastic experiences in KL, and unfortunately some lousy things also happened to us, but more elaboration on that later. Overall, I can see why KL might rub some travelers the wrong way, but I can also see myself living and thriving in that electric, vibrant city someday.

Next post: Langkawi!

* packing for Malaysia, which is happening tomorrow (oh god where did the time go?) Thus far I have twenty skirts and no underwear in my backpack. I should probably rectify this.

* jogging – ! – every day this week! I know, I can hardly believe it too. We’ll see if I keep this up when I get back from my Malay vacay, where I fully intend to stuff my face with food and lay on the beach all day.

* saying goodbye to the teachers, including the Dog Lady. Update on that: when I got back, she told me, “I’m afraid I can’t give you the dog because he is too dirty.” Apparently, he has fleas. Phew!

Today I gave her a dog mug and some doggie treats as a going away present. She thanked me and said I should come visit her at her new school sometime, which is nearer to her hometown. “By that time, the dog will be clean, and then I will give to you.” D’oh.

* pinning pretty things on Pinterest. For hours, to the detriment of everything else I need to be doing right now. If you’re on it, add me!

Now I’m on the other side, totally reluctant to go back to Korea. It’s not that I won’t be happy to see my students and friends in the ROK. It’s been unseasonably warm and pleasant here; meanwhile, Korea is buried under snow and ice. I’ll have to leave behind my adorable two and a half year old niece, who just keeps getting cuter and smarter and more amazing as time hurtles forward. (Linguistically, she’s leaps and bounds beyond even my brightest students in English, and at this rate she’ll surpass me by the age of five). She’s been attached to me ever since I arrived, following me around and shouting “hi Auntie karenology!” every time I walk in, and sometimes (during a rare moment involving her sitting still), she’ll just stare at me with the hugest smile on her face. I’ll be leaving my sister and brother-in-law, my parents (both lonely under different circumstances), and my friends, who dropped everything to come see lil’ ole me. I’ll be leaving a country where things more or less make sense to me. I’ll regress mentally, going from a place where I am able to have witty conversations with adults, back to a land where I am on the lower functioning end of the mental totem pole. I’ll go from being surrounded by family in a cozy home, back to life alone in a tiny apartment between a dump and two love motels.

It’s always hard, going home.