Malaysia and Easter Sunday

There’s not a whole lot to say about Malaysia, it’s an interesting country. I pretty much just stayed on the island of Penang. It was a lot more westernized than I thought it would be. There were starbucks, mcdonalds, pizza huts everywhere plus there were 7 elevens every few blocks (but they all had the same kind of slurpees, go figure). There’s even a 7 story mall which needless to say, is huge. The best thing to do was to just walk around and explore the markets. It is a pretty diverse country though, the population is mainly Muslim but there is a good amount of Buddhists and Taoists. A lot of times there would be a Mosque on one side of the street and on the other side of the street there would be a temple. I went into a few of the Mosques which were really cool, the temples were cool to go into too, they were always filled with tons of incense. Also, five times a day all the mosques would do the call to prayer which is cool to hear and you can hear it if you’re within an earshot of one of the many mosques.

On the first day Ben (my roommate) and I went and hiked Penang hill. At the base of it there were 2 Chinese-Malaysians that were hiking halfway up so we ended up hiking halfway up with them. It was pretty cool cause we talked to them about politics (which they were particularly interested in), economics, and all kinds of things. This was a fairly intense hike, it wasn’t that hard of a hike but the climate really messes with you. It was extremely hot and extremely humid, by the time we were halfway up I had drunk all of the water out of my Nalgene and my clothes were soaked. By the time we got to the top I definitely could’ve wringed out my shirt and filled up a good sized water glass with sweat. But at the top there’s a mosque and a temple and a hotel with a restaurant.

Throughout this whole trip I’ve been trying to find a futbol game to go to and watch and so far I have not succeeded at that. In Brazil there aren’t any games during Carnival. In Cape Town there weren’t any games the week that we were there. And in Malaysia we had heard from a travel agent that there was one going on at a stadium, so we had him write down the name of the stadium and that stuff. Rick, Chad and I decided to try and go see it, so we got off the ship, found a taxi driver and told him what stadium we wanted to go to. The stadium was on the mainland and we soon found out that this taxi driver had no idea where the stadium was, he was calling tons of people on his cell phone trying to get directions to the stadium and at the toll booths along the way he’d ask them where to go. Little did we know that this was just the start of things to go wrong. It ended up taking about an hour to get to the stadium, we got there and got out of the taxi and walked up to the stadium. We thought it was kind of odd that the parking lots were completely empty, but we were about 4 hours early, so we thought maybe things would pick up later. We walked around the stadium and tried to find the ticket office but the best we could find were some security guards at the VIP entrance. They didn’t really speak English but after talking to them we found out that the first game isn’t until May 2nd. So we just stood around and tried to figure out what to do. This stadium was in the middle of nowhere and our taxi driver had left. There were only trees around, a highway that didn’t seem like it was used very often and about a kilometer past the highway was a small housing development. We finally decided to walk over to the housing development and see what was over there and maybe find a taxi since our taxi had left. We walked over there and there was pretty much nothing out there. The houses looked like they were straight out of a horror movie and the majority of them appeared to not be occupied. Plus no one spoke English so that didn’t help much. After walking around for a bit we decided to go back to the stadium and talk to the security guards and see if they can call us a taxi. We walked back over there and went up to them and there was a new security guard at the gate whom we hadn’t seen before but he spoke pretty good English, we explained our situation to him and he talked to his fellow guards for about 5 minutes or so then he looked back at us and said, “Let’s go” and he walked towards his car, we were a bit confused but we just followed him to his car. He happened to just be getting off of his shift and he decided to give us a lift! At first he told us that he’d drive us to the bus station where we could catch either a bus or a taxi. Then he told us that he’d take us to the ferry that would take us from mainland Malaysia back over to Penang (since Penang’s an island). We ran into tons of traffic going back over towards Penang that was due to the Penang bridge being closed (the 3rd largest bridge in the world). We found out the next day that it was closed because someone put a bomb on the bridge. But because of the traffic we told the guy that was driving us to just drop us off at this mall that we were passing that was right next to the bridge (we didn’t know there was a bomb on the bridge), he had already driven us about 50 minutes out of his way and we didn’t want to make him wait in traffic any longer. We hung out at the mall and then when we were ready to leave we argued with taxi drivers for a while and we finally found one that would take us to the ferry for a decent price, but once we started driving our taxi driver realized that the bridge was open again and asked us if we wanted to go all the way to Georgetown in Penang (which is where our ship was docked), he offered it for a good price so we took it. So we drove over the bridge and into Georgetown and hit traffic on the island and we were stuck listening to nothing but american love songs in our taxi for an hour. We finally decided to walk the rest of the way (we were all sick of the love songs, they literally made chad sick) and we just got out of the taxi and walked to a bar! All in all this was about a six-hour adventure that pretty much got us nowhere but it was good fun!!

The Penang National Park was pretty cool to go to. I went there with a group of people and we hiked around and saw some mokeys, ants, tons of trees and also a monitor (which looks just like a komodo dragon but it’s not). That’s pretty much all the park had to offer us aside from tons of sweat.


Easter Sunday

Easter Sunday was pretty cool. Archbishop Desmond Tutu had a morning service on the ship. Even during his services he's really funny. Plus he was wearing his purple gown which made things all the better! In addition to the service I had class on Easter Sunday and I got a haircut!! This was the first time I had class and gotten a haircut on Easter Sunday, hopefully I won't ever have class on easter sunday again.