Greet­ings! It’s been a while! My fam­i­ly and I joined a bus tour to Malaysia, so I’ve been away from the inter­net for a while, which was a rather refresh­ing expe­ri­ence, actu­al­ly! I did­n’t miss the com­put­er one bit through­out the trip because our sched­ule was packed with so many places to go and so many things to see! Here’s Malaysia, viewed from the giant met­al bird!

But of course, with a bus tour we only went to touristy places and I wish I had expe­ri­ence more of the cul­ture… but here are some mem­o­rable moments from our short trip!

Impres­sion #1: food!

We ate three square meals every­day of deli­cious Chinese/Malaysian food, with var­i­ous local food-tast­ing tours in between. This is our first meal in Malaysia. The orange plate with the banana leaf in the top left is grilled stingray :S and in the beer mugs are lime and sour plum drinks.

Anoth­er day we had a trop­i­cal fruit and dessert buf­fet at the zoo.

Impres­sion #2: beau­ti­ful architecture!

In the city…

… and on the river.

Many build­ings we went in had beau­ti­ful floor tiles!

Impres­sion #3: love­ly beaches!

Here’s Jorge, hav­ing a Kodak moment at the beach while I went beach-combing.

There were lots of buried trea­sure to be found at the beach! Though I was wor­ried that I could­n’t car­ry corals onto the plane, so I had to leave them. But I took many pic­tures of them and picked up lots of love­ly, colour­ful rocks! Will have to show you those later.

Zumi took this amaz­ing pic­ture of a beau­ti­ful piece of coral.

Impres­sion #4: trop­i­cal plants!

I was par­tic­u­lar­ly drawn to these fuzzy red ones…

… and these pink flow­ers that grow on trees.

Our tour also includ­ed half a day in Sin­ga­pore. It was at the end of the tour and at that point I was too tired to prop­er­ly appre­ci­ate it (plus we had to get up at 5am to cross the bor­der from Malaysia). And so I real­ly did­n’t see much of Sin­ga­pore, but I’m rather pleased with Zumi’s pic­ture of the Sin­ga­pore landmark/symbol, the Merlion.

Actu­al­ly, the high­light of Sin­ga­pore for me was find­ing the giant Peeps in Sen­tosa!

It was sit­ting in front of a giant can­dy store, where I also found the marsh­mal­low peep bun­ny plush! It’s so fluffy I’m gonna die!!!

So I brought it home :D

Last but not least, I want to show you this video I took of a sea tur­tle swim­ming at a zoo we vis­it­ed in Malaysia. Though I’d rather see him swim­ming in the sea, he looked rather con­tent behind the glass. Hap­py, even. And so very graceful.

That’s it for Malaysia! Would love the oppor­tu­ni­ty to vis­it it again, and Sin­ga­pore as well! And final week in Hong Kong! I think I’m going to miss it when I leave.

Until then, more sight­see­ing! Will keep you posted!

Hope you are well!