Life is Beautiful

First of all, I should say thank you to everyone that writes comments on my blog! I am hoping that my adventures encourage others to get out there and explore too. But overall it just makes me really happy knowing someone is reading this, haha :)

So I am sitting downstairs of Crystal's Guesthouse in the heart of Chinatown in Georgetown, Penang. We were lucky to find this place- the owner is incredibly nice and it's so clean! A big plus after sleeping with mice our first two nights :) We are packing up and looking up bus schedules trying to figure out how to get to Singapore. But I am avoiding packing and blogging instead!

Today was absolutely amazing. We got up early and took the 3 hour ferry ride over to Langkawi, which is a popular tourist destination near the border of Thailand. Unfortunately we could only the stay the day since we are trying to see half of Malaysia and Singapore in 9 days. Ambitious schedule but so far we are doing it! The ferry ride was beautiful... unfortunately so beautiful that I got caught up in the experience (apparently I do this often- Melinda and Daniel have made comments about me "wandering" too much- oops!) that I didn't put sunscreen on and didn't realize we were outside for over an hour. Now I'm more sunburned than I've ever been in my life! I will pay for this tomorrow...

Anyway, we ran off the ferry, hired a taxi ('hired' = rent in Australian english) and went to ride Lasah the elephant!!! It was WONDERFUL! Life long dream fulfilled for sure. And apparently it is possible to have 2 lifelong dreams fulfilled in one day because then we were walking to the beach, and we just happened to see a man feeding some friendly monkeys. And he gave me some peanuts to *feed the monkeys*. I officially am over the moon. It held my hand and pulled the peanuts of out it. Absolutely amazing.

We wandered around the beach and hung out for about 2 hours. I tried to stay out of the sun but I just love the water too much. Then we wandered over to the marina and tried to get a taxi back to the ferry. Of course, there were no taxis going our direction so just as we were starting the 2 km trek back to the last location we saw cars, a nice man pulled up and gave us a ride! Fortunately I had done this in Costa Rica so I wasn't freaked out- I think Melinda had a mild heart attack but she'll survive :)

To finish off the wonderful day, we were able to watch the sun set over the Straights of Malacca. I don't think I've ever seen the sun set while out in the water before. The only thing that came close was the sun setting in Maui when the family went there several years ago so it brought back good memories.

I am starting to get a stomachache from all the crazy food Daniel has been making me eat. Last night's Indian food (slightly different than the traditional Thanksgiving dinner!) was probably what put me over the edge. I guess it's something about being foreign and blonde in Little India that gets you 5 waiters and eventually with enough help we figured out something to eat. In general though, I noticed people are really friendly here, always smiling. Anyway, Daniel has been trying to get Melinda and I to eat from the food stalls outside and tonight he finally succeeded. I didn't eat too much because the squid hanging outside was a bit unappetizing but I did have the satay chicken, coconut milk (from a coconut) and I tried the ice cream/ bean/ jello/ ice combination before deciding my stomach is not going to hold out any longer. Tomorrow just Melinda and I are going to Singapore (leaving Daniel for the day in KL) and we will be running to pizza! The first thing I am eating in the States is a burrito! I can smell those black beans and salsa from here ;) More stories to come soon!