Had a great time in Penang, Malaysia.  We had two shows – one fun one, and one not so fun one.  But, I’ll talk about that stuff on another site.  I want to share my impression of Penang here.  The city itself is on an island and, like other cities in Malaysia, is spread out and traffic is therefore dependent on cars.  We stayed at a lovely hotel right on the beach called the “Lone Pine Hotel”.  Staff was great and the facilities were clean, comfortable, and attractive.

We didn’t really see too many sights.  We went to two Buddhist temples, one Burmese and one Thai, but I’ve seen plenty of temples.  There are nice rolling hills around that you can hike along.  Then, of course, there’s the beach.  Many of the beaches have large rounded boulders sitting in the sand which give the beach a nice exotic look.  The water is semi clear, though we were warned that it was dirty and that jellyfish were a problem.  So, the only swimming we did was in the pool.

I did try my hand at parasailing for the first time.  Basically, I was volunteered by telling the boat operator to go fetch the harness and the boat.  It’s a piece of cake though and the view was awesome.  I just regret that I didn’t have a camera with me!  You basically clip in to a chest harness, attach it to a parasail, and clip in to the line attached to the boat.  The boat takes off and you see the line disappearing into the surf.  Then, you start running as the line is becoming taut and within just a few steps, you become airborne.  There’s basically nothing too it; just let go and enjoy the ride.  I did feel like I was slipping out of my seat, but then I realized that I should be standing and not sitting.  Glad I got that figured out pretty fast.  Once you get up really high, it’s nice and peaceful.  Looking down is quite a thrill too – just your feet followed by the ocean two to three hundred feet below.  Coming in for a landing was pretty easy.  The boat just slows up and then I had to steer myself in to the beach simply by pulling on a line of the left side which just guided me in to the left.  I started running as I hit the beach…perfect landing.

Some shots around Penang and the beach:

My first introduction to “Penang” food was the popular Thai Kitchen restaurant in Bellevue.  I think that every time I went there, I ordered “Penang Curry with Beef”.  So good.  That led me to erroneously believe that Penang was actually a region in Thailand, not Malaysia.

Many people told me, “Oh Penang!  Food paradise!” And it’s true.  So, knowing that, I put my diet decisions completely in the hands of our agent and guide, Wilson.  He didn’t steer us wrong.  We were there four days and four nights and on our last day he told us, “You’ve sampled about 10 to 15% of what Penang has to offer.”

Penang food is dominated by “street food”, which is just like street food in China – food served in a very spartan and open restaurant right on the street.  It’s hard to say what my favorite was.  Maybe the fish broth with chicken and noodles (see the pics).  Just as worthy were the awesome drinks.  Like the rest of Malaysia, Penang has it’s own variety of cool and refreshing tea and fruit drinks.  I think my favorite was a “rose syrup” drink.

Anyway, have a look at ome shots of Penang food along with a description:

We’ve finally put together the video for our performance at barZ!ing.  The show was a lot of fun, especially Saturday night, when we ended with the new song that just rocked the house.  Most all of the footage is from Saturday too because the camera battery died almost immediately after first use on Friday.  That’s the second time I thought I charged the camera but I hadn’t (or the adapter came loose or something).  Not matter; as with “Outside My Window”, the second performance was much better than the first.  Enjoy!

After the shows in Kuching, we returned to Kota Kinabalu to meet with more folks and potentially do some more shows.  We ended up performing no shows; everything was just too chaotic, air travel was becoming complicated, so we returned a little early.  But, at least we got a few hours of quality relaxation by going to Mamutik island for some snorkeling, swimming, and general relaxation.  One of the promoter’s sons, Quadee, accompanied us.  These islands sit just off the coast of Kota Kinabalu and are in plain site of the city.  They take about 15-20 minutes to arrive at using a speedy boat.

We were a little lazy and went fairly late, around 11 am.  It would have been better to get up early and get out there in the morning.  For one, the sun wasn’t as intense, but also we could have avoided a common afternoon rainstorm.  Storm or not, it was a good time.  We arrived at a small doc and paid a cheap entry fee to the national park service then made our way to the beach.  I didn’t have much of a sense of the size of the island, but it was quite small.  End-to-end was just a couple hundred yards or so; a five-minute walk would get you to the opposite side.  Only one side had beaches, the rest was rocky.

We started off right away by snorkeling.  I’d never done it before but it was pretty simple.  Once I got the hang of it, I swum out pretty deep.  The further I went, the more impressive the underwater sites were.  There was plenty of coral, brightly colored fish, and those weird undulating underwater plant things…kind of like sea anemones or something.  I was startled by one, having looked around to one side and returned my sight straight down, it seemed that the plant was reaching up to me with thousands of slippery tentacles.  So, I moved on.  Part of the ocean floor dropped away steeply.  I turned around and made my way back and saw more impressive fish including one 3-4 foot silver tube fish thing that also caused me to just slow down and let it pass by.

I’d been out here for quite a while and I felt a little dizzy, so I got out and just enjoyed the beach for a bit.  While we were trying to decide what to do next:  move on to another island, move to a new beach, or just go back for another round of snorkeling, the wind started picking up and the clouds darkened.  We could see rain coming from Kota Kinabalu.  Within minutes we were engulfed.  We thought it would last just a few minutes, but it just kept raining harder.  By now, most everyone had left the island while we just remained hanging out under a tree.  We would have gotten back into the ocean, but there was lightning too.

Eventually, one of the island “rangers” told us we needed to go back.  We got completely soaked running back to the boat.  As soon as we boarded, the boat sped away.  The high speed rain stung us.  The only thing we could do was hunch over our things (like cameras) to protect them as best as we could from the cloudburst.  By the time we arrived back, the rain stopped and it looked to be clearing up.  Oh well, it was still a great time.

Apparently, “Kuching” means “cat” in Malay.  So, it’s basically the city of cats.  I believe Venice bestows a similar honor on cats, but in Kuching, the reason is that the geography of the land, carved with rivers and the coast, looks like a cat.  I believe that in Venice cats are still held in high esteem for helping to vanquish the rats during the Bubonic Plague.  There are several statues of cats around Kuching.  So, it’s a particularly friendly city for cat lovers.

Edwin, the owner of the BarZ!ing, picked us up at the airport and took us for an excellent late breakfast and early lunch.  I’d learned the dish “Nasi Lemak” from the plane and requested that.  It was the best Nasi Lemak that we had during the whole trip.  The dish consists of white rice and chicken cooked in a savory pungent dark sauce.  It’s often served with peanuts and anchovies along with cool vegetables like carrots and cucumbers on the side.

Drinks are also a great feature of Malaysian cuisine.  I remember lots of excellent coconut drinks during my brief stay in Kuala Lumpur but I was advised that the drinks in Kuching were quite different.  They were more concentrated on teas, maybe a little closer to the Chinese variety but still designed to be served cool and sweet.  We had a three layered tea.  The three layers consisted of:  tea, milk, and “special”.  The “special” was some sort of thicker sweet concoction, probably some coconut in it as well.  Regardless it was awesome.  We also later enjoyed peppermint tea, milk teas, iced lemon tea, and sweet and sour fruit drinks.

We were pretty busy during the days of the shows.  The first day we went through the set during the sound check, which sounded great.  The second day, we tweaked the set based on ideas that we got from the show the previous night.  Needless to say, Saturday was a more rockin’ day than Friday, with the club being packed with lots of lively folks.  The contestants of the Miss Borneo pageant even showed up and we had our pictures taken with them.

The video will speak for the performance better than words can, but I was satisfied with it.  The song that we worked on specifically for that show was a tune developed out of an idea from part of “The Big Instrumental” from the Frozen Taco II album.  I actually started working on in at least a couple of months in advance but couldn’t seem to make progress on it.  The whole new House music genre was new to me and it just didn’t seem to be coming along at all, though I knew what I wanted to achieve.  The week before the show though, I realized that we had to do this new song no matter what, so I spent two long evenings in a row working on it, getting feedback from Davide on further ways to improve it.  I still didn’t have any guitar parts for the middle part.  That’s what the day before the performance was for.  The parts I came up with weren’t bad, but I’m going to redo them and make them more interesting.

Wanna hear a short sample?  Here’s the ending of Saturday’s show…I think we went out on a really high note.  I was pleased:

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Of course, after the Saturday performance, we went out to eat with the club partners and enjoyed some more great food and drinks.  We rolled into the hotel around 5am.  I didn’t sleep very much and, to my disappointment, woke up at 8am.  I at least lay in bed until 9am before I admitted to myself that I wasn’t going to fall back asleep.  I spent most of the remainder of the morning answering emails and catching up on some work.

In the afternoon, we went to a crocodile farm.  I’d seen plenty of crocodiles before but Davide and some of our hosts hadn’t.  Next, we enjoyed a thoroughly relaxing massage performed by Chinese girls living here in Kuching.  They didn’t speak a word of Malay or English so it was just like being back in China.  Finally, we ended the trip with a big seafood dinner.  Really awesome food they have here.  Thanks to our hosts for taking such good care of us!

When I was kid, my bedroom was adorned with old maps.  Hmm, I guess that’s still true with my place back in Seattle – maps of the Cascades, maps of the Rockies, and so on.  The largest map in my bedroom though was a “Wonders of the World” map that showed the whole earth with small thumbnail drawings of key points of interest.  One was Borneo and I can still visualize the picture and caption:  “Headhunters”.  That always weirded me out.  Now, I find myself in Borneo with Davide for some performances.  Never saw this coming.

We flew in to Kota Kinabalu just a couple of hours before sunset.  From the plane, we could see the small city nestled in the fertile green land and trees often obscured by wet swaths of clouds.  The granite-capped Mount Kota Kinabalu wasn’t visible.  This was the rainy season when the Borneo’s highest mountain (13,435 ft) is often hidden by the clouds.

We only had a short stay in Kota Kinabalu (or “KK” as the locals call it); we were due to take off early the next morning at 8am for Kuching.  So, we took off immediately and scouted around the town, picking up intel on different hotels (the Promenade was a rippoff), a Malaysian SIM card for making phone calls (I also set it up with Call Me in China, which worked like a charm – got a Thanksgiving call from my folks), and a nice Indian dinner served on a banana leaf.

One thing that struck me was the ubiquity of logos like Facebook and Twitter.  It was refreshing to see these corporate Internet logos about town reminding us that we were no longer in a country where half of the top ten sites in the world are blocked.  To me, it felt like we were back in civilization.

Around 11:30 or midnight we set the phone alarm and went to bed.  The following morning we were woken up by a horrible alarm.  It sounded like the fire alarm, but was coming from the wrong direction – from outside.  I tried to ignore it and continue sleeping but Davide got up and said, “Hey, it’s your phone!”  “No, it’s not”, I struggled to say, thinking he was joking.  But, sure enough it was.  I’d forgotten, I used the “airport” alarm where I’d chosen the worst sound possible so that I’d get up.  How ironic – that plan almost backfired.

Intent on not getting ripped off again, we walked down to the main busstop and hopped on a clanging bus for 1 Ringgit – thirty times cheaper than the day before not to mention more colorful.

Wow, feels like I’m turning a corner with Chinese.  Even though I don’t regularly “study” now, I do still talk to lots of folks in Chinese and pay attention to new words and phrases.  Here’s a sign that I’m turning a corner.  I’m starting to recognize parts of different words appearing in other words.

Here’s what I mean:  In Chinese, all characters in the written language are just one syllable.  In fact, there is no basic word that’s more than one syllable, hence mono-syllabic language.  More complex words are just combinations of these basic words.  I’ve never encountered a more complex word that’s beyond three characters.  In fact, the longest words I know are just for modern objects, something like “hair conditioner” or “wireless network”.

So here’s my recent example of words that I learned and how they fit in with other words:

can (tone 1) jia (tone 1):  means to attend something, like a meeting or a class.  The “c”, by the way, is pronounced like a “ts” together.

can (tone 1) guan (tone 1):  means to go on a tour of some place, like when you’re traveling.

guan (tone 1) ling (tone 3):  is part of the bigger phrase that I know:  “huan ying guan ling”, which is what you hear every time you go to a restaurant.  It’s basically “You’re welcome to visit this place”.

See the correlation of all the basic words.  I learned “can jia” when learning how to ask about attending yoga classes.  I knew “huan ying guan ling” from a long time ago, and I knew that “huan ying” was “welcome” and “guan ling” was “visiting place”.  So, when I learned “can guan” it was easy to understand the derivation of the word, something like “attending visit”.  Pretty neat, huh?

Another Chinese New Year upon us!  That means: time to travel.  I can’t believe this is my third Chinese New Year spent in Asia.  My first trip was to Guilin and environs.  My second was to the Yunnan Province.  This year, well, though there is still plenty to see in China, it was time to leave the country.  The Plan:  Cambodia, a place that I’d wanted to visit ever since I was a kid.  Reliable Li Zhen was my traveling partner again and he booked the air tickets to go.  Because there was no direct flight to Siem Reap from Shenzhen, we connected through Kuala Lumpur.  Because Li Zhen told me that our layover would be overnight, I lobbied for us to spend two nights and see the city.  Good call.  Kuala Lumpur, like Cambodia, had a certain exotic ring to it, which was why I was so interested in a vist.  For some reason, the creepy opening scenes of the one of the early seasons of 24, set in Kuala Lumpur, is what sticks in my mind most.

However, this trip was far from creep.  We stayed in a posh hotel, the Traders in KLCC, in Kuala Lumpur (or “KL” as the locals like to call it) while Cambodia was much more lower end (but still quite comfortable).  The hotel is very affordable though and the view of the Petronas Towers is unbeatable.  Kuala Lumpur is a very easy city to get around in for English speakers, way easier than China.  I mean there’s not even any comparison.  English is widely spoken.  I only encountered a few people who could speak any English, and yet there was always someone nearby to help out.  So, want an easy taste of Southeast Asia?  Try here.

However, make sure you enjoy oppressive tropical heat.  In January, it was hot and humid with temperatures pushing into the 90′s.

After dropping off our bags, we headed out.  Our first stop was to find some food and we settled on a sit down Lebanese place.  Later on we found the highly-sought-after food street and made our eating home here for the rest of the trip.  The food was cheap (do I daresay cheaper than China?) and tasty.  It’s a nice blend of many Asian cuisines.  Same for the tropical drinks; they were numerous, cheap, and refreshing.  My favorite was some sort of coconut drink with a sweet tangy brown substance that you mixed up.  Also, as is popular in Asia, was some sort of green tapioca substance which you could suck up through the straw.  Weird stuff, never tasted anything like it before, but it was good.

It seems I’ve been visiting various tall towers of the world lately, Shanghai being the latest – and best, so I felt we needed to go up into the Petronas Tower, but this was a big waste. I knew that we were only allowed to go up into the Skybridge, but this might be cool, right?!  “NO!”  It’s not that high up, and getting the stupid tickets is absurd.  They’re free, but you have to wait in line.  And I’m shocked at how long I waited in line with hoardes of other people to get them.  And yes, they did “sell out” for the day after I got our tickets.  But, before you go up, you get to watch a movie.  Pretty cool, right?  “NO!” again.  It’s a long propaganda film about how great the Malaysian Petronas company, an oil and gas company by the way, is.  Then, we go up in the Skybridge and take a few pics.  Li Zhen summed it up well when he asked, “Is that all?”

Fortunately, we got our good view shots from the hotel and from the KL Tower, a tall telecommunications tower which affords the best views of the city.  We did this at night, and by the end of this day, we had marched over a large section of Kuala Lumpur (it’s really not that big) and were beat.  We picked a relatively expensive “executive cab” to take us back to the hotel.

We spent much of the next day wandering around a large park/garden area just north of KL Central station.  We took the train to get to KL Central, then, against the advice of a security guard, opted to walk our way to the gardens.  It was quite convoluted, crossing major roads, going through a museum exhibit of ancient weapons, and a tunnel before we arrived.  A neat thing about the city is that there are various places that monkeys run wild, and the garden, of course, is a great place for them to hang out.  We ended up finding our way to both the bird pavilion and butterfly pavilion, both of which were fun tourist destinations.  The bird pavilion boasts that it is the largest walk-through bird park in the world.  Maybe it is; we were there quite a while.  The butterfly pavilion is much smaller, but a densely packed tropical enclosure with butterflies.  I still don’t think it was as good as Callaway Garden’s butterfly conservatory, but they had a collection of BUGS that was awesome – and disgusting.  They had plenty of displays of pinned down monstrous bugs, including some abominations that I thought, until now, only were found in movies like “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”, but they had some live specimens too:  foot long brutes that fortunately were labeled as “rare”.

After the gardens, we hopped a cheap taxi to go over to China town.  Strangely enough, I couldn’t find much native Malaysian food outside of China town, but I did find some within China town.  We didn’t wander too long there.  Much of it was quite similar to parts of China, although the salesmen all spoke English.

We decided to turn in early since Li Zhen had booked us super early departure tickets for Siem Reap.  Because it was a 7am departure, we had to get up at 3:30am in order to be at the airport in time to catch the flight.  The distance from the city center to the airport is absurd.  And you thought the Denver airport was bad.  The Kuala Lumpur airport is at least three times as far away.  And the strange thing is that there seems to be a grid of highways that we cross over to get there.  Not sure where all those roads go to, but we sure did get on and off a lot of exit and entry ramps.

By the way, do you know how to pronounce:  “Kuala Lumpur”?  No, it isn’t Koala Lumpur, as in Koala bear.  The “Kua” sound is one syllable and sounds like “Kwah”.  Everything else is how it’s written.

Oh yes, and I need to thank Robert for his various tips on Kuala Lumpur.  He told me about the “Nasilama” food (see pictures), the big gardens, and various time saving tips.