Sashagfriend

July 31 Right now I am on the "white beach" in Pandaganbai waiting for the sun to come out from behind the clouds. Today we havent done much besides the "goodbye breakfast" and come here - and there isn't much here besides a few streets with funky restaurants and hostels. I don't think ive ever been in a town this small actually, but it's low key and relaxing. I was really hoping to do some shopping while I was here because we haven't really bought anything on this trip in anticipation of buying in Bali, and now there's hardly anything off interest in the stores :( but maybe tomorrow in Legion (where we're going continuing on to). Okay i just took a 5 minute break to go into the water - wow! That was the ... read more

It was a packed day. We walked through the market in the morning; there were fish of all kind and in all stages of life, and after life, for sale. We tried a new fruit, "snake skin" which was actually really good! Once you peal off the skin (which kind of looks likes an old lychee) you can eat it in slices like an orange. The women let us try the various fruits and vegetables proudly showing off their selection. Then we went to visit a puppet maker. We sat in a circle and silently, without saying a word he just took a block of wood between his feet and started hacking away at it with a machete and saw. Miraculously, it morphed into a detailed puppet head of a Hindu god. After, he led us ... read more

Sasha We walked around kuala lumpur for a while, orienting ourselves with the city. It's so much more modern here than i ever could have imagined!! I don't know why, but I imagined it gloomy, dark and crumbling. Instead it was like all white, with tall skyscrapers everywhere that were actually really pretty to look like. The buildings had a lot of art deco and millennium themes...and there's the third largest needle(communication tower) here as well as the "twin towers" which are stunning. There are parks and it's clean and very civilized, kind of how I imagine tokyo to be, as opposed to the bangkok chaos I thought. It seems like keeping the city buildings modern seems to have been a government priority for a while, instead of keeping old buildings as historical site, they just ... read more

Melaka complements Penang and Kuala Lumpur beautifully. It is a much smaller city with a village theme. It was colonized by the Dutch which is can be seen in the buildings and actually reminds me of old new York in a way. Overall Melaka seemed a bit folky, but maybe that was because the museum's 3D exhibits made it a little hard to take learning about the nations history seriously. There was a canal that ran through the middle of the city and it was the perfect place to sit and have lunch and cream my mom in gin rummy :p The first day in Melaka we arrived in the afternoon and walked around to get oriented. The following day we started off bright and early with a Trishaw tour of a Chinese temple, mosque and ... read more

Sasha So I lost my flip flops last night. Okay, I'll start from the beginning. Krabi, a concrete beach town, turned out to be pretty crappy. So, after snorkling on a few surrounding Islands (including the island where the movie "The Beach" was filmed) two people from our group, Mike and Phoebe, decided to stay on Phi Phi island with us for the night instead. We went to dinner at this hole in the wall, mom and pop place and had really good pad Thai there, accompanied by a large Chang beer. Then we went to the beach and watched a fire show at this place called Monken. It was on a roped off area and not as romantic-seeming as when I saw it at Khoa Samed last time. There the guys were tattoo artists ... read more