MALAYSIA BITCHES!

Pardon the name of this post. While Katherine and I were reminiscing about Malaysia over a bottle of wine, we came up with Malaysia bitches as the title. It just felt right. For those of you uninterested in reading such a long post, here is a short-cut to my pictures.

The great adventures of Katherine & Gina. Malaysia was awesome and Katherine and I tore it up and ate a lot (my pants are tight now!). To sum things up - Malaysia = Noodles. The street food there is amazing and we ate tons of seafood noodle dishes. Malaysia should be apart of the Vietnam/Thailand/Camodia adventure most Americans go on. A ton of people we met there had never met Americans so they were very excited to meet us :)

Also, I learned a lot about Katherine as our live were pretty much all open all the time - once you're with someone traveling in a 3rd world country with crazy hole in the floor toilets, you're ok with sharing pretty much anything. Good thing K and I are really open anyway :) Ok, on to the itinerary:

Kuala Lumpur (or as the cool kids call it - KL)
We landed in the KL airport and signed up for a van to take us directly to our hotel. The airport is about 1 hr away so we knew it was going to be a ride. However, we didn't expect to get an entire tour of the city while dropping off others to their hotels and for us to be last to ours (after they told us we were the first stop). So after 2-3 hours in a lovely van, we got to our hotel. The hotel was chic cheap ($35/night and actually really cute and clean). That night we went out around the town, and found an amazing bar with giant Hoegardens (my fav) and apple flavored hookah. We chilled there and had a great time.

The next day, we took a hop on hop off bus tour around the city and say the KL twin towers and the many other sites. KL in general is a really cool city with loads of activity & night life. Also, in KL, Katherine was nice enough to take a shot of my calves where I had a total of 42 bugs bites from the knees down. 42 you say? YES! 42 bug bites the first day!!! Thank goodness I was taking Malaria pills...

P.S. The customs line was a TOTAL cluster and we basically read an entire book while waiting in it. Be prepared for zero organization and crowds when you arrive :)

Melaka
Melaka was a cute town with a lot of character. We got in late at night and went down to Janker St (main local shops/food st) and it started pouring. We ran through the streets, got a beer, and then stopped in this hole in the wall place for dinner, which cost us $4 ($8 including beer).

The next day, we hired a cab to tour us around the city and show us the sights. We took a boat tour throughout the city and bummed around the cute town (they had the cutest bikes!) At night, we went back to the hotel to have a bottle of wine and some food at the hawker across the street. (FYI - hawkers are the food cafeteria areas with street food stands). We met a TON of people there including a guy who everyone said loved us, but was scared to talk to us. Naturally, I went over and gave him a hug and he looked terrified. The whole place was laughing after that! We made friends with our waitress and the guys sitting next to us. Almost everyone we met wanted a copy of our pictures so they gave us their addresses to send the pics to them. But, they gave us their real addresses, not email! Looks like we're mailing pics to Malaysia! It was sad leaving Melaka given our cute hotel and cute town, but we were off to Penang after 2 days.

Penang
Pretty much the only reason we came to Penang was for the food. Katherine read that Penang is the place to be for food lovers and since we both eat like pigs, we figured it would suit us well. And the reviews were right. When you arrive at the airport, instead of brochures for sights, you pick up brochures for food crawls. Our mission was to eat as many of the local dishes as possible and as much as possible. Here are the adventures we encountered as we were eating...

We arrived to the hotel from hell. Now I'm pretty low maintenance, but this place was below my minimum level of comfort. When we got there, Katherine took a nap and I went outside to call other hotels for availability in case I couldn't handle it. I also got really itchy after we arrived and was convinced it was due to the room and the room had bed bugs. Fortunately, it was a heat rash. Ok, on to the room. First of all, the bathroom was disgusting and the toilet only worked about every 5 tries. Of course, they had no toiletries besides a small bar of soap so we used soap for shampoo. I felt so ghetto... And to adjust the air conditioning in the room, you had to stand on a chair that was about to snap and move card board slats over the vent. Yeah...

To avoid our situation, we escaped to the beach to hang out and used the uber nice hotel's facilities. We seriously contemplated using the shower at the pool instead of our place! Also by the beach, there is an awesome night market and a great hawker area with the best fresh egg rolls.

After the night market, we decided to head back to the hellhole we called our room. On the drive home from beach, the driver had to make a stop to pay his friend b/c he borrowed 50 ringget. K and I now know he probably bought drugs and took a hit before driving us the 30 min home. We were scared for our lives the entire way - the driver was twitching and itching all over & kept talking all sorts of crazy shit about bombs. K and I were glancing at each other and looking for sharp object to defend ourselves and location markers so we know where we were. He was also driving at crazy speeds and taking corners like a mad man. (Reference for the fam- like crazy corners that Dad used to do when we were little).

Thankfully we lived and arrived at our hotel where Chinese men were playing checkers and/or sleeping in the streets. Yeah...don't stay at the Oriental Hotel in Penang...

Langkawi Island
Ahhhh Langkawi - what a glorious step up from Penang. After a 2.5 hour "ferry" (aka - small boat) ride we arrived. Our hotel was slightly more expensive, but what we endured in Penang made it worth paying the extra money. The island was beautiful and we had a great spot on the beach to watch the sunset, of course with a bottle of wine :)

During the day, we rented a moped and bummed around the island. We ended up going to this place where you can take a ski lift up to the top of the island and the view was AMAZING! We also hiked up to this beautiful waterfall and went swimming for a bit before the monkeys came (we decided after they stole a can of Pringles that we were done - damn smart monkeys!)

Food situation: Once again, we loved it all and found a few awesome restaurants that we frequented. The best was this Chinese seafood place where they had amazing fresh fish. We also loved this traditional Malay restaurant where we discovered tea tarik (pulled tea), which is a Malaysian specialty. Also, our hotel had this amazing brunch with a huge spread for free everyday. K & I were happy.

Other highlights:

• Our couples hot stone massage, which was kinda weird
  
• There are a TON of trannies in Langkawi, which was quite a surprise
• We found this awesome wine shop in town that was duty free and got good wine for $10/bottle
• We used an ice bucket instead of a champagne bucket and the hotel wouldn't lend out their wine openers (apparently the staff had only one to share - at least that's what they told us!)
• A little message I sent Riki from Langkawi :)
  

Unfortunately, we had to leave. On the way back to Hyderabad, we had a to sleep in the KL airport and found residence on some chairs in a chocolate shop that was open all night (or until they kicked us out at 4am). We did end up playing a bunch of trivial pursuit and we discovered that both Katherine and I are terrible at that game and apparently know nothing of other cultures. All in all, the trip was amazing and I'm lucky that Katherine was such a great travel companion.