I <3 Malaysia!

Hello again everyone!
Today is my last day in Malaysia...it's about 10am on Sunday. For all of you it's still Saturday night!

Thursday was a really fun day, I went to a chocolate factory here in Penang and then to the botanical gardens. The gardens were beautiful! So many pretty flowers, trees, actually it felt like we were walking through a jungle...and we saw monkeys! In fact, one of them tried to steal my bag, haha! They're very tricky little guys, there were some babies in a tree and I was distracted taking a video of them and while I was paying attention to the ones in the tree another monkey came right up and started looking through my bag looking for food. I actually got a video of him looking through it so maybe I can figure out how to post the video. Thursday was also a cool day for meeting locals here. We came across an older guy who offered to be our walking guide for the day at no charge! He took us around and helped us find the chocolate factory and everything, and he really knew a lot about the area too so we got to know about some of the places we were walking by. We also had a really cool cab driver on the way back from the botanical gardens who took us to a few temples along the way! So overall, a very fun and successful day!

So last night I got back from Langkawi, a little beach town near Panang. I was there since Friday morning. We spent one night there in a cute little motel right on the beach! The motel only cost me about 5 US dollars. It was awesome. So it's a 3 hour ferry ride over to Langkawi from Penang so I took the ferry over with about 15 other people from SAS and we also ran into Rahini, our Malaysian interport student. He and a couple of his friends from Penang were also going over to Langkawi for the night so we got to hang out with them for most of the time which was cool because they helped us out with the language barrier and knew how to get around and stuff. Actually, the 3 guys from Malaysia decided to rent a car so we could drive around which made it all a lot easier. None of us from SAS wanted to rent the car mostly because we weren't so sure about this whole driving on the left side of the road thing!

So we got to Langkawi and it was pouring down rain, and before we rented the car we took a taxi into the middle of the city were more stuff was and started looking for food and a hotel. We ate lunch at a thai food restaurant and it was delicious. Then it was raining even harder but we still needed a hotel so we ventured out into the rain with our raincoats and umbrellas and walked along the side of the road looking for a place to stay. It felt like such an epic adventure, I was having a great time! I had a raincoat, and a waterproof backpack and my chacos on and my pants rolled up and I was ready to trek through the torrential rain! So we found a cute little motel right on the beach, like I said and it was super cheap and fairly nice too! Except for the bathroom, which seems like a trick thing in Malaysia, just like in India. They don't use toilet paper much here either except for in pretty fancy places. Luckily we were prepared and brought our own roll of TP! So we got our hotel rooms, at that point there were 8 of us, so we got 2 rooms and 4 of us slept in each room. We put our stuff down, settled in and decided it was time to go down to the beach! So we ran through the rain to the beach and jumped into the ocean, which was WARM! I've never been in an ocean that was as warm as here. I've only been to oceans in Maine and California which aren't very warm. Sooo that was awesome. It was actually warmer in the ocean than standing in the rain, so we stayed in the water for probably 2 hours. It was so fun, and we kept finding (sometimes by stepping on them) little crabs inside their shells. So after we finally got out of the ocean we kind of rinsed off in the rain because the shower in the hotel wasn't that great and then we all went out for a snack at this really nice restaurant, and then wandered around for a little while in the rental car and then went for an amazing Malay dinner! Then we met up with a couple other people and went to a Malaysian club! So that was a fun night, and then yesterday we got up and went to the beach again because it had finally stopped raining, and then headed back to the area where the ferry is and got our tickets and then just hung out around there for a few hours and then caught the 5pm ferry back to Penang. The ferry back was really crowded, lots of SAS people were coming back at the same time and the bathrooms on the ferry were definitely the nastiest thing I've ever seen, haha. I was glad I brought my own toilet paper and well no need to go into details. We'll just say worst bathroom ever. Haha. But anyways overall a really fun little trip! And today I am using some free internet in the Starbucks here in Penang (yeah, they have a couple Starbucks' here, haha ridiculous...) and later on this afternoon I'm visiting an orphanage with SAS. Then tonight at 8pm we leave Malaysia, and head to Vietnam! The days are going by really fast now especially since we only have a few days between each port.

Well I guess that's all for now. I'm working on loading some photos from India and Malaysia onto my flickr page, so definitely go check those out!! :-) there are some good ones! In case you forgot, that site is: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jennieturcios/

Oh yeah, forgot to say...I had a conversation with the Malaysian students about Obama. Seems like they mostly support him here too. Very interesting. The only country so far I haven't heard anything about him in was India. But it sounds like Vietnam largely supports McCain. So it will be interesting to get to Vietnam and see! Anyways, I hope everyone's doing well. All of you who are at the Sonlight fall retreat right now please email me and tell me all about it when you get back. I wish I could have been there with you guys!

I miss you all and love you!

*peace*