Oh Malaysia we hardly knew thee. The story of how we ended up visiting Malaysia is like this: we were poking around wanting to visit as many places as we could and we found out an airline had a sale going on where flights leaving Kuala Lumpur started at $24 (but with paying to pick a seat- mandatory and everything else they ended up being like $55) so we figured we would trek down and then fly to Cambodia to prevent backtracking.  So we hopped in a mini van and headed down first to Buttersworth/ Georgetown then onward to KL (that's what those of us in the know call Kuala Lumpur). 


The trip down to Buttersworth wasn't too bad really. The first leg of the trip was insanely crowded and we had some very chatty Aussies and Brits who I didn't much care for and had some very interesting ideas of what the US was like. 

For instance did you know there are people in Central Park that never stop running around it? It's some ultra marathon. Also, they think if you are Australian and move to Canada you are more likely to be made a US citizen then if you just try from Australia? I never knew that... and I really don't think it's true but shhhhh...

The second leg of the trip was better, there was only one other person (a very nice German girl studying abroad in Malaysia) and the driver ended up putting on the classic "Shark Night 3D". I thought it was for us to enjoy, but nope he had his very own screen and was watching along with us.

Chad sometimes tries to document his feelings (Edit: if I recall correctly, this is the first leg and I had just seen that one of our 'van-mates' defecated in her yoga pants so...yeah...)

The weak smiles MIGHT be because at this point our digestive systems aren't where we wanted them to be
Fun fact about Georgetown/ Buttersworth. Not only does about half the population celebrate Chinese New Year (so places were closed) the other half are deeply religious and they close on Sundays. Guess what day we had there? Yeah. So needless to say it was a bit of a bust. But it seems like a cool area and I wish we had more time to explore since we really only had like 8 hours there.

They take keeping people off the soccer fields VERY seriously here

Decoration and awkwardness for Chinese New Year


These benches, modeled by the beautiful Brittany, look horribly uncomfortable, but I guess it discourages bench hogs

Fishing and the bay. I forgot my fun fact about the bay but it has something to do with warships (Edit: I don't know if this is what she is thinking of, but you could Google "Battle of Penang")

Advertisement graffiti....

So this house is supposed to be the old house of the Malaysian JP Morgan. We wanted to see it but we just missed the tour time and the next one was after we had to leave. On a related note I think I want my house to be this color. 



A pretty gorgeous Muslim mosque

So back in the day there were a lot of Germans and Europeans here, this is where they were all buried. It was a pretty cool cemetery.

Turns out this happy face will not last. Even though it was a comfortable bus.
Our trip to Kuala Lumpur was nothing except hellish. Our bus was supposed to leave at  6pm and arrive around 10pm. It didn't leave until almost 7pm and the traffic was so bad we didn't get into town until around 1:30am. What makes it worse is we found a hostel near the airport, not near city center because we figured we could take public transportation out there. Well around 2am there is no public transportation (it stops at 11pm, which would have been fine if we had arrived on time). So we took a super expensive cab to a really bad hostel. 

Anyway, after getting a couple hours sleep we went out to go explore the city. We only had one day to do so since our flight left bright and early the next day. We didn't have too many things on our list, so we decided to just see what happened.

I really liked this... for the ladies only... but it seems like guys only listened to that sign at night

They had a soda here called Kickapoo! It was okay.
One of the few things on our list was these beauts. The Petronas towers. You may recognize them from this delightful flick.


Brittany was trying to get a picture of the whole thing.



Just another selfie.
At the bottom of the towers was a pretty awesome area. We ended up spending a significant portion of our day there just hanging out. One of us might have been a little tired and grumpy, but  I  they powered through it by tricking everyone into spending about 2 hours hanging out at Starbucks. It might have also been that they had nice bathrooms nearby and those previously mention digestive issues hadn't quite cleared up. 

Don't worry the mall had it's own Maybach. 

In the part on the other side of the towers,

They had a super fun splash pad for kids that we were trying to figure out if we could go into or not... it was soooo hot.


The towers at night

They also have a pretty sweet Bellagio esque fountain show.
We ended up enjoying dinner in the mall food court, where fun fact we saw two mormon missionaries (which answered my question of if there were missionaries in Malaysia) but we didn't go talk to them because we thought it was weird to interrupt their dinner to have awkward chat time. But guess what else we found there (not a hard guess if you've scrolled down to read this) somewhat authentic Taco Bell like Mexican food! Chad got a huge burritos and "nachos" and my chicken filled quesadilla with "nachos" is pictured below.


I thought this was really funny. If you don't have your hair removed you'll end up looking like an orangutan.
So, on our flight to Bangkok we had read that KL had the world's largest gumball machine and decided to try and find it. It was not easy. Most people don't learn gumball machine in their English classes, so just stop reading for a minute and think about how you would describe it to someone using simple English words. Thus our dilemma.

So we took the limited info we think we could get from people and the offline map I downloaded of the city and went exploring. Here's some of the sights....

Chinese New Year decor in a different mall... with sooooo many horses everywhere.

It was super pretty to walk around in.



A lot of the buildings were lit up and had some seriously fantastic architecture. 


More fun dancing water fountains.
We were about to give up on our quest because it was getting late and we had a long train ride and hike to the hostel and you know... the public transportation closes, but at the last place we decided to try we found it. "The World's Largest Capsule Container Vending Machine"


I feel racist doing the "V for victory" (not peace) sign in China so I like to do it outside China. Also, Chad was so excited to see this. Can you tell???
The next morning our flight was set to leave at 7am. Ugh I was so stressed our driver was like 20 minutes late and then decided to go pick up another person. Lucky for us the KL airport is... ummm I don't want to say ridiculous, but the security isn't on par with any US airport. We were able to check our bags with only an hour till the flight, security was a joke - there was just a man putting stickers on bags and to get to our plane we walked for about 15 minutes out on the tarmac, without personnel, ropes, signs or anything to keep us on the right track. (Edit: this was written before the Malaysian airplane went missing... I don't want to make light of what happened it's incredibly sad and a bit confusing, but seriously we all discussed how lax the security was and that it was surprising how quickly we went from the car to our gate).

Good news though we got Dunkin for breakfast and this cool picture of a plane taking off right next to us!

The tray table had things to try in Malaysia... we failed at many of them.