malaysian madness!

A couple of weeks ago I took a vacation to Malaysia with a few friends. It was so nice to get away and have some fun in a beautiful country with green parks and beautiful beaches and jungle and shopping malls...and delicious food. We pretty much ate our way through Malaysia, and it was amazing!

There were four of us that explored Kuala Lumpur for a day and a half before we headed in opposite directions to beaches!

Chinatown offered some fun and laughs!

And, we felt like we spend much of our time in KL waiting for buses, so what else do you do when you sit at the bus stop for 30+ minutes? Take crazy posed photos, of course!
Our experiences in Little India were less than amazing... I was at least in a good enough humor to smile about how our orders of diet coke somehow turned into tin cups of beer, but Kelly was less than amused after hours of searching for where to buy bus tickets and putting off lunch until 3pm! (And, we did have to pay for the beer we did not want or drink...and never got our diet cokes...)
Danielle and I actually have an embarrassing amount of photos with poses very similar to this one. This was at the top of the KL tower, looking out over the city.

After a couple days in KL, Danielle and I took a bus to Penang where we stayed with a very gracious family. We explored Georgetown and stumbled across some amazing treasures...like Cafe Amelie. It was the cutest vintage cafe!!

We took a jungle hike...

...that ended on a beautiful beach.

And, we just wandered and relaxed and had an amazing time of refreshing!

Malaysia is a land of incredible diversity. It was so interesting to walk down the streets surrounded by Chinese women wearing stiletto heels next to Arabic women in burkhas with Indian men selling curry and roti in a corner shop. It is such a unique taste of Asia, and one that I was glad to experience.

But, I will say that as nice as it was to have a holiday, it was even better to arrive home again. I love the feeling of flying into a familiar place with a language I understand (most of the time), with sights I know. Oh, Cambodia, how you have wrecked me...