Penang
Trip Start
Feb 07, 2007
1
36
50
Trip End
May 15, 2007
Penang, Malaysia. We arrived in Malaysia today. I don't know what I expect from each port, but I suppose I'm still like a little kid in that I think that when I look out over a new place it'll look distinctly South American or African or Asian. Or that it will feel different. But no. The world, different countries, none of it feels any different than home, at least not right away. If it weren't for the different cultures, it would all feel the same. Which isn't surprising, because when it comes down to it every place is land with different climates and landscapes. Just because it's Asia and not North America doesn't mean it's going to "feel" different. Which, you know, thank you Captain Obvious but I'm okay with my child-like expectations from time to time. We woke up early, as we always do the mornings we dock, to have breakfast and get everything ready. Today it was particularly important that we get all of our shit together because we were planning on going straight to the airport from our SAS island city tour. By 9am, we were in the Union with our backpacks, waiting for the announcement that we could go to the seventh deck to get our passports. By 10am, we'd cleared customs on the ship and were sitting at the back of a ferryboat, breathing in diesel fumes as we made our way from the ship in the harbor to the mainland. Unlike India, we weren't greeted by masses of people offering us taxi services. Instead, as were met by men of all ages who were tickled beyond belief to be looking at so many American girls. Seriously, what else can you do but laugh when men in their sixties and over are trying to flirt with you? Smile, and get on your tour bus. At least that's what I did. And let me tell you, that tour bus was the loudest tour bus I've ever been on when it comes to colors. Blue carpet with yellow, orange and green squiggles floor to ceiling, including seats, and pastel yellow and blue curtains- ruffled curtains. I missed half the tour because I had to keep my eyes shut to prevent myself from going blind. Well, at least that's the excuse I came up with for sleeping from place to place. I know it was my first day in Malaysia, and I should have been soaking in all of the sites, but I just hadn't slept the night before. I can never sleep the night before we arrive in port because I'm just too excited, so I end up exhausted the first morning. We had nice long drives between our stops, so I caught up on some sleep because we were at the very back of the bus in seats we could recline almost horizontally because no one was behind us. I took in a couple of Hindu and Muslim temples and some streets that reminded me of Puerto Rico, narrow streets full of shops and cobble-stoned streets, in the time before my snooze, but I slept for the remainder of the forty-minute drive on a two-laned road alongside the beach and through the rainforest, to the butterfly farm. We spent a little under an hour in a steamy greenhouse home to thousands of butterflies. I saw a live millipede for the first time, and also scores of scorpions in an aquarium and a couple species of lizards and turtles, but the most memorable experience was seeing the "Butterfly Species Identification" chart (dead butterflies behind glass) in the butterfly farm. I did find it helpful to be able to look at the specific markings on the dried butterflies that helped me identify the live ones around me, but there was just something so wrong about the live ones perching on their brothers' and sisters' mausoleum. However, I wouldn't have minded if the primary attractions of our next stop were dead as well, considering I hate snakes and we were at the only Chinese temple in Malaysia covered in snakes. Snakes slithered around shrines to Buddha, and Joe, the SAS cameraman gathering footage for our DVDs, asked me to hold one of them so he could take a video of it. I tried to act natural in front of the camera- I have had acting classes before- but I am terrified of snakes and when he handed it over to me it started nuzzling its mouth against the skin between my thumb and pointer finger, I got a little nervous. Apparently the snakes have been de-venom, but that doesn't make me any more comfortable with the idea of being bitten. I gave the little green reptile back as quickly as I could before getting back on the bus to head to our next destination, lunch in the industrial district. The thing I love about Malaysia is how at home I feel here, literally. The industrial district looked exactly like the industrial area back in Vegas- lots of traffic including cars, trucks, and big tanks of trucks- driving along from square cement building to square cement building. Our bus parked in a parking lot right by a beach, and our bus shuffled into a room that looked like it could be used for wedding receptions. Food was set up in the center of the large room buffet style, but we weren't allowed to touch it. Instead, waiters brought us dish after dish after dish of rice, octopus and vegetables, and sweet and sour chicken for lunch. We ate, and Margaret, the oldest lifelong learner on our voyage who recently turned ninety-one, bought a Tiger, the local beer, and let us all try some. She was so cute, telling us she only wanted a sip and how could we expect an old woman to finish a whole glass, so she insisted that the table finish it for her. After we ate we took pictures on the beach, a beach that we all thought smelled like India. The only places in Malaysia that were dirty were the beaches. The country has a 35-year prison sentence if anyone is caught littering, so the city is incredibly clean. Especially after India, we were all amazed that any place could be that clean. Except for the beaches, which really weren't that bad but it was where the most trash collected, along the shorelines of the pier, in the rocks at the beach right outside our restaurant, and even when we would go to Langkawi. And with the trash being in or near water, we all recognized the smell of India. We climbed up onto a dock and took pictures in front of the small islands out in the water before getting back on our bus and heading to Southeast Asia's largest Chinese pagoda in a little small-town area. The streets were narrow and haphazard, not following any sort of pattern at all but just bending this way or that and connecting at odd angles and randomly dead-ending. Shops with people standing outside of them lined the streets, and our bus dropped us off right outside of the entrance to the pagoda, which wasn't exactly an entrance. You had to walk up an incline for roughly the equivalent of six flights of stairs with more shops from grocery stores to clothing stores all set up in a walkway with a ceiling barely higher than my head. It wasn't as bad as India, where saying no two or three times wasn't enough to shut the vendors up, but here every single man or woman standing outside his or her shop offered something to you. I'll tell you, after here and India the mall in KL we would go to tomorrow was glorious without all of the solicitations. After the incline we arrived at a parking structure that we had to continue through to get to a turtle pond, with hundreds and hundreds of turtles and the first glimpse of the golden multi-colored pagoda tower. After another few minutes' walk past the turtles we finally arrived at the pavilion of the pagoda. At the center was a smaller tower surrounded by little Buddhas on a retaining wall, and opposite it were steps up to a gold Buddha behind a gate. We took pictures before climbing the stairs that wound around the pavilion to go into the shrine, but before we could Lauren was asked by three little Malaysian women to take a picture with them. They walked up to her, and all we could understand was picture. Lauren declined, saying she didn't need them to take a picture. They kept trying, and then she offered to take a picture of the three of them, but that still wasn't what they wanted. We finally caught on, that they wanted her in the picture with them; most of the Asians we've come across are just fascinated by the blondes. The three women, who made Lauren look like as tall as the pagoda tower, alternated having their pictures taken before we took off our shoes and entered the shrine to pay our respects to more gold statues of Buddha lining three sides of the brilliantly-colored prayer room. We wandered in and out of the rooms of the shrine, loving the Chinese paper balls on the ceiling and the smell of incense throughout the place. It didn't make me feel different, that I was in Malaysia in particular, but I did feel like I was far away from home. I felt out there in the world somewhere, watching people bow and kneel to Buddha and walk around barefoot in the shrine. I went to a pagoda in Mauritius, but this was clearly was the largest in the Southeast. We didn't even have time to climb the rest of the way up to the main tower because we had to be back on the bus and it was going to take a few minutes to get back down to the street. Hot and moist from all of the climbing in humid and contained spaces, I arrived at the bottom in desperate need of some water and some cool air. The bus felt glorious, with air coming from above and behind Lauren and me, in our perfect seats at the back. We were running out of time, even though we'd skipped a stop to a spice garden that morning and were skipping a stop by Fort Cornwallis to get back to the ship at five, so we talked to our tour guide and had her call to arrange a taxi to pick us up from the Botanical Gardens so we could get to the airport on time. It would have been faster to get picked up from the pagoda but the main reason we wanted to go on the SAS island tour was to go visit the monkeys at the Botanical Garden. Rebecca had brought some bananas with her from the dining hall, which we were told multiple times not to feed them because they'd follow us around the rest of the afternoon. Well...okay so we blatantly ignored the rules and the signs posted on the gates and handed out the three bananas to the monkeys. The bus had parked right alongside the main entrance, and the monkeys were sitting on the wooden light poles and link fence, which Matt approached cautiously, a banana in his hand. Immediately a little monkey scurried down the light pole and snatched the banana, and we spent the next few minutes watching him fight off the others, scampering along the top of the fence around and over them, finally settling atop another light pole, the peel in his feet and the banana in his hands. After he finished it they all got bored and went back into the trees they'd come out from, and we still had more bananas so Lauren took the next one up to the gate. Our trip leader saw us this time and we got a little scolding, but I have to say watching the monkeys in action was totally worth a minor reprimand. They swing, jump, fight, hit each other on the head, anything to try to steal food from each other. I'd wanted to try to get a video but we decided to go inside the gates and watch some of the other monkeys climbing around in the trees and playing with coconuts. We walked up to the trees and Joe asked me to do another segment for him, so I talked about the monkeys and giving them bananas even though we weren't supposed to, but he made me do it over again and leave out the part about breaking the law. We weren't at the gardens for very long, just long enough to visit the monkeys for a short bit before our fellow students pulled away in the tour bus we were in a cab on our way to the airport. We arrived and had to pick up our tickets, which was the longest part of the process because the airport was just empty. Two people stood in line ahead of us to pick up their tickets from Malaysia Air, and once we got to the counter we were through security and at our gate within five minutes. Once we got through security, the airport was like a mall, with specialty shops and even a few designer stores along the nearly mile-long hallway with all of the terminals. Every airport has shops it seems, except for airports in India, but I felt like I was back in the states. It had been so long since I'd looked at fashion magazines and billboards like we have in the States, and I realized that even after my time in the third world I'm still attracted to beautiful clothes. Is that bad? I mean, I don't think it's really a bad thing but it was just a realization that I guess there's not a whole lot in the world that will really be able to bring me out of my consumerism. We got some snacks before boarding the plane, and I slept on the fifty-minute flight for a little pick-me-up for the rest of the evening. We arrived at the KL airport, which I really think was an airport inside of a mall, and caught the KL Express train from the airport to a major train station in the city where we caught a taxi the rest of the way to our hotel. We arrived at the gorgeous Mandarin Oriental pretty much across the street from the twin towers, and checked into our three-bedroom apartment with a perfect view of the city out of the front windows and the towers from Becca and Matt's bedroom window. I felt incredibly awkward checking into the hotel, dressed down and in a group of kids being escorted to our room by a receptionist. We clearly weren't the typical business clientele, and I feel like the rest of the guests in the huge marble lobby thought we were going to cause some trouble. It just makes me realize that even though I know myself and that just because I'm young doesn't mean I can't handle myself in these kinds of places, but not everyone else knows that. And it made me feel a little self-conscious. I guess I tend to forget that not everyone expects me to act older, but instead expect that I would act my age. So I felt myself overcompensating for it, watching my posture and paying particular attention to my manners when interacting with people. I like to say I don't care what other people think about me, but I suppose that it's just not entirely true. I do care, especially in situations like that. We left the hotel and walked across the street and through a park to Rum Jungle to get something to eat before checking out the clubs along the street. It was a Monday night and fairly dead, and I was tired and Victor didn't feel well so after dinner at Rum Jungle and a drink at a Thai club he and I went back while the rest stayed out for a couple more hours. I hated to be a party pooper, but I wanted to be rested for the next day and exploring KL! I took a shower and flooded the floor (because who knew that you had to lift the very American-looking drain in order to let water through?). The drain in the shower had holes in it and I thought it was just a little bit slow, so I tried to make sure the water didn't get too high in the shower, but apparently it splashed a bit because the floor around the shower was soaked. I bent down and realized that the drain had a little lip and imagine that, once lifting it the water drained right out. So, if you ever go to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, don't expect the water to drain on its own. You've got to play with the drain first. After cleaning up the floor I climbed into my incredibly comfy bed, sprawled my entire body out over it, and slept like a dream.
