Finally Got One :)

Carly and Colin go kayaking in Malaysia

This past weekend me and Colin went to Kuching, Malaysia for a relaxing trip before starting to study for finals. While there, we went on a kayaking trip. It was more for scenery than adventure as the river was classified as a level 0. Here are some pictures from our river trip for your entertainment.

before we started



Our guide took us to a small waterfall along the way

Cambodia

A few weekends ago, Team NUS traveled to Cambodia. (Yes, we have a name - just in case we can't spot all of the freakishly tall white people in the group we just call out for the team)

The trip started as we left PGP, our dorm, at 3 in the morning to catch our 6am flight to Siem Reap. Once there we went to our hostel, ate some breakfast, and then headed straight out to see Angkor Wat - a very old temple built around the 12 century. If you ever see picture of Cambodia, this is probably the place you will see; the picture of Angkor Wat is even on the flag.

Me sitting in front of Angkor Wat


Team GT in front of Angkor Wat



Asian size staircase on the right-very steep and small
A more western size friendly staircase built on the left including a handrail for

After a day of exploring the temples of Siem Reap we woke up the next morning to grab a bus to Phenom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. The bus was about 6 hours so we didn't do too much once we got to our hostel. We grabbed some food, then hung out on our deck area. It was very nice, with couches and hammocks and on a lake. The next day was filled with lots of culture and history. We went to the killing fields and s-21, a former elementary school that was turned into a prison during the Khmer Rouge regime. It was very weird to see classrooms even still with chalkboards in them turned into cells.
Our next day we flew out in the late afternoon, so we went to a local market to fill some time. It was interesting to see, but very very warm with all of the stalls being so close to each other and under a cover. There was not much air circulation going on in there.

Random picture of me and Quynh in Singapore

Friends in Singapore!

This past week I had 3 visitors come to Singapore: my mom, erin, and oscar :) I was lucky enough for them to take a break from their busy work/school schedules to come see me! Oscar made with with the new giraffe lamp. All four of them should be on the way home right now. They should hopefully be getting in Sunday night in atlanta. They left very early this morning (3:30) :(, so they will definitely be exhausted on their 'day' of travel.

They had one night in Singapore, then it was time to go see Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I don't have class on Monday so we had to take advantage of them being here on the weekend. We had 2 packed days of fun and animals. The first day started off with us playing with wild monkeys. We got to feed them and take plenty of pictures.

Once we started feeding them, our guide knew Erin really liked her new friends so he taught her how to attract them to sit on her shoulder. The conversation went something like this, "Now these monkeys are kind but remember to be careful as they are still wild animals...okay so here hold this food over your head while this wild monkey climbs up your body to fetch it." This one was very happy just to sit on Erin's shoulder(as long as she kept feeding it)

The second day we woke up bright and early again to go feed/ride the elephants :) We fed them papaya and peanuts. They were so happy.

After we gave them a little snack, everyone lined up to ride the elephants in this nice little circle. Erin,one other girl, and I were the last to go on. We started in the circle when all of a sudden he(the elephant) was told to leave the circle. We rode him down to the river where he was then commanded to just tilt over and we all went under water. Once everyone got in the water it was time for bath time. This consisted of just chilling in the river splashing water on the elephants. (After they were done bathing, my mom got to get up on the elpehant from in the water to ride him out of the river.)

We are now back in Singapore from our great KL adventure celebrating St. Patrick's Day.

Saturday we stumbled upon a free food festival wandering through one of Singapore's many malls. First we were just eating all the free samples, but we broke down and got ourselve's a little bit more of a snack. It was chicken satay with rice -pretty tastey, the drink- lemon with sour plum

After our snack we (that's Quynh) made our way to a Ducktour. It was a tour of some of Singapore part on land and part in water. We got to see the Esplanade, or Durian as they call it, which is Singapore's version of the Sydney Opera House. We got to see a good amount of other stuff on the tour, but most importantly we got to go right by the merlion! :) yay merlion.

Sadly they had to go back home and the week came to an end. It was a lot of fun, but way too short. They are both headed back to work and Erin has to study tons now for her final tests, and I guess I should catch up on some reading.

for more fun visit Erin's blog

Thaipusam

A few weeks ago I got to watch a festival called Thaipusam here in Singapore. I'm not very good at explaining it, so I will refer you to wikipedia for that part: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaipusam

Here are a few pictures of the festival:



Sorry, not very much to this one. Just putting up some new pictures before I leave for the week. It's our recess week -aka spring break- here. Tomorrow I am headed off to Vietnam with a group of 8 other friends :) So, there should be more pictures hopefully when I return. My batteries are fully charged and ready to go.

Here's the mail that never fails, it makes me wanna wag my tail, when it comes I wanna wail maaaaiil

Thanks for all my letters and packages :) It has been very exciting. Below are a few pictures to share my excitement (sorry it's not all, haven't had my camera around for everything).

Here was my first package! It was a great treat that my parents sent. Inside was filled with napkins (they don't like those over here), movies to keep me entertained (I've already started watching Scruff- the movie on top), and Cindy contributed some delicious snacks to keep me alive (yay easy mac- I've already had 2 of them so far).

Today I received my second package for valentines day from my parents. The hearts on the left say 'e-mail me.' I was amused but a little sad. On the right is me struggling to open said package. I remember talking to my mom after the first mail experience and I shared with her that it was really difficult to open it with all the tape since I don't have any scissors, well apparently that transfers in her mind to "maybe I should make the next one even more ridiculously tougher to open." Thanks. So I thought I would share me with my key working hard. Don't worry, once I finally made it, it was worth it :) Goodies from cookies to a stuffed pink puppy.

I soon realized the puppy was just an organic 'Save Our Planet' trick...

Enjoying some amazing cookies

I also got a card from Erin today! Two things of mail in one day, life can't get much better than that. The cute puppy with the pink boa was in my package, and Erin sent the yellow puppy card.

Thanks a lot to everyone!!

Tanjung Pinang, Indonesia

This weekend the group went to an Indonesian island named Bintan. We have such rough lives here laying by the pool in between classes, so it was nice to sit by the beach and relax.

Welcome to the beach!

We got to stay on a shack on the beach. It was great not traveling anywhere - just wake up and nap in the sand. The picture on the left is part of the hut we stayed in. There were four separate rooms of two. My room is the one over the water :) The picture on the right is the view out of my window. It was great falling asleep at night listening to the water under us.

Here is my roommate for the trip, Stephanie, showing
off our sleeping(left) and shower(right) arrangements. We had a luxury room- most the others didn't even have a shower head, just the bucket and a scoop. It was nice, the water wasn't even too cold.

Here he is :)

Here is my awesome giraffe lamp. And to answer a previous question from a viewer, he is definitely coming back home. Now you will all get to know and love him too. His chord is even a US plug, which I realize just means that he is really only for tourists, but who could resist him? I know Erin will at least appreciate this.

Melaka, Malaysia

This past weekend a group of us headed to Malaysia. It was about a four hour bus ride. We woke up really early Friday morning and came back Sunday morning. It was a good weekend trip, as there isn't too much to do in the city. It is pretty old and interesting, but after a few days you run out of stuff to do. There are beaches nearby but you can't get in the water, so we decided we didn't want to go to a beach where we could lay on the sand and look at the water. There were 8 of us on the trip. We met up with 6 others that we knew but they had to leave a day later than us because they had Saturday classes.

Our hotel is below. We were going to do a hostel but the ones we knew were full, so we found this place and it was a good find. We would highly recommend it if anyone happens to ever go to Melaka. It's in China town, right near a pretty cool night market that they have every night. (I got a giraffe lamp at the night market, pics of him later. He's really cute.) The guy at the hotel desk was really nice and sent us to good local food places. We found that the harder it was to communicate to the waiter, the better the food probably was. It wasn't too expensive either. My room was 148 ringgits for 5 girls, which basically came out to 8 dollars a night.
Here we are wandering through the city. We found some sort of playground rope thing, so we decided we should climb it. It was kindof rough, but at least provided about 15 minutes entertainment.



Somehow someone thought all the tech kids in the group should take this picture :( It wasn't very nice. We found this in the mall. Yes, we went to the mall for part of the day in melaka. We didn't mean to, we just found it. They had interesting stuff and it had air conditioning so that was enough to keep us around. There were tons of shirts with english words on it, and they were all complete nonsense. They were just random words thrown on a shirt.

Found it :)

So here's what they gave me as an address:

Block 17, level#05-29, Room N
37 Prince George's Park
Residence 4
Singapore 118430

Merlion!!

Hello

It seemed that we were off to such a nice start sitting in the airport eating a delicious cinnabun. I finished it and was ready to board so I could start my nap. Well apparently the plane wasn't ready for that. I'm not sure if what the problem was or why the plane wasn't there, but we ended up leaving Atlanta two hours later than scheduled. Unfortunately for me I had about 2 hours from when I was supposed to land in san francisco to when I should be getting on my next flight. I missed my flight by about 10 minutes.



Here is Teddy ready for bed at the hotel. We were given a hotel for the night since the next flight to singapore was the next day. I guess it was nice to sleep, well nap, in a real bed though before the long plane ride started. Teddy was not amused though to wait for bed making calls to Erin to be home informer and Andrew with his excellent email skills. Thanks guys :) I had some e-mailing to do since I was going to be arriving 12 hours later, but didnt want to deal with paying the $15 for it in the hotel room. We did make the flight the next day though :)





This was found in one of our food court areas. I thought Erin would like it.
And yes, if we don't already stick out enough we have no problem being
those people and taking pictures in the middle of the cafeteria.
Me and a random tree on campus.


Me and a random tree on campus.




ps- for all the people who are going to come visit me, we've discovered there are no napkins. I just thought I'd give you a heads up. We haven't found a single one or paper towel anywhere in the country.