A Few Notes On Malaysia

Apparently I can actually be halfway good at haggling. I bought some (very fake) Gucci sunglasses. The guy offered them to me for 110RM. I laughed and walked away. As I was walking away, he started shouting other prices to me, going down to 70RM. This was still way too much, so I refused to go back. A couple of minutes later, he came to the stall I was at and dragged me back to his stall. He offered "just for me" 50RM. This was the price a friend bought for his sunglasses, but it was still too much, so I offered 20RM. He said no, so I walked away again. He came back to get me again. He finally went down to 30RM. I offered 25RM and refused to budge from that. He finally relented and gave them up. So yeah, went from about $30 to about $7. Not too bad.

Nobody in Singapore or Malaysia uses knives. A lot of places have forks and spoons rather than chopsticks, but never knives. I've already gotten used to this to the extent that I got halfway through my eating my lunch with my fork doing all of the cutting on Saturday before I finally realized there was a knife I could use.

Malaysia is a Muslim country. Everyone who went this weekend knew that. However, it didn't really sink in until we realized all of the hotel rooms had a copy of the Koran instead of the Bible.

I had the two scariest taxi rides of my life this weekend (admittedly, I have not ridden in too many taxis back home). I will go into details tomorrow, but for now I will simply say I am thankful to be alive.

I realized why Asians are all skinny. They eat just as much fried food as us and just as many carbs, but all of their portions are about 1/3 the size of ours.

I gave in and had American food this weekend. A prize in the form of one of the first postcards I send to the US to anyone who can guess which fast-food chain I went to.

We went to a bar Friday night. We had to pay 20RM for the first beer and each subsequent beer was 1RM. For those who don't know the conversion, that means we were buying beer for 35 cents.

I spent a three day weekend in a foreign country and spent under $300, including all lodging, airfare, and food. Beat that Western world.

I will post pictures tomorrow, I promise.