This post is coming to you from Phuket! Last weekend we were in Kuala Lumpur. It’s a tough job… but someone’s got to do it =).
Since our last post, flooding in Thailand has gotten worse and worse. The country is experiencing its worst flooding in 50 years. According to the most recent article I read, 62 of Thailand’s 77 provinces have been inundated and 3.5 million acres and as much as seven million tons of crops have been destroyed. From what I hear from people in the U.S., this hasn’t received much news coverage there. If you’re interested, google “Thailand flood” and articles will come up. Here is one of the most recent. This website shows a map of the flooding, it’s in Thai but all the blue parts are the flooded areas.
Water has been slowly approaching Bangkok for a couple weeks now, and we keep hearing different news every day. So far, 9 days of school have been cancelled. At the beginning of this week, a 5 day holiday was declared for people to evacuate. The Chao Praya river runs through Bangkok and a combination of monsoon rains and high tides have combined recently to overpower some of the key barriers blocking water from entering the city. Over the past few weeks, water has been diverted into nearby areas that were already flooded to keep Bangkok safe, but not much can be done at this point. Now the water just has to drain to the ocean, directly through Bangkok.
We were told by the school to stay in our apartments or try to leave Bangkok, so last night we purchased tickets to Phuket, an island in the South of the country, and will be staying here through Monday night (at least). School is supposed to open again next Tuesday, but everyone has been saying not to be surprised if it’s still closed longer. Accurate news is hard to come by concerning whether or not our neighborhood will be affected, and we’ve been hearing for a couple weeks now to be prepared for 60-80 centimeters any day now but nothing much has happened. One Saturday night there was about ankle-deep flooding, but it was gone by Sunday morning.
The airport was packed this morning, and flights were delayed because everyone was trying to leave town. If we hear school is closed longer we’ll probably try to stay down here longer. There is so much to see down here, and it’s all beautiful. Now for more on our trip to Kuala Lumpur!
We had a scheduled 3 day weekend from school (separate from the flood stuff), which coincided with the weekend Jacob needed to leave the country because he’s on a tourist visa which needs to be renewed by leaving and coming back to the country every 60 days. I took the Friday off (school ended up being canceled that day because of flood stuff anyway) and we went to Kuala Lumpur for a four day weekend.
Kuala Lumpur is a very interesting city and we had a great trip there. The city feels completely different than Bangkok, or anywhere else either of us has been to in the region (or world for that matter). Primarily, these differences lie within the people and the city itself. The people are quite diverse, and the ads around the city reflect this by ensuring that there are always at least four people who look completely different in each of their ads (chinese, malay, indian, a combo of those, and lighter and darker skin for all of those). Most people there are Muslim, and there is also a full range of Islamic clothing styles. Interestingly, skin color and clothing weren’t necessarily correlated (women who looked chinese wearing headscarves and fully covered, and middle eastern looking women wearing very western style clothing). There was also a great deal of interaction between groups – you would see a group of young adults hanging out at the mall together, and half the women would be wearing head scarves and the other half typical (American) mall clothes.
The city itself was also unique. Kuala Lumpur boasted, at one point (although no longer), the tallest skyscraper in the world as well as the highest tower (think Space Needle in Seattle). While Petronas is no longer the tallest skyscraper, it still is the tallest twin tower building. There are many tall, beautifully built buildings in the downtown area, but after being there for a little while, we realized that there is only a downtown area. It’s full of corporate offices and hotels, but void of condos and apartments. It wasn’t until Monday that we fully realized this, as suddenly, everything was crowded and busy on streets that were relatively quiet over the weekend. Without any knowledge of Kuala Lumpur’s history, it seems that the city was built next to a large residential area, rather than gradually developing within one.
Some of the other highlights included the food, a language using letters that we could read, widely spoken English, and lots of green throughout the city. We visited Batu Caves – a large limestone formation with beautiful caves close enough to the city for it to be a train stop – where monkeys tried to steal our water bottles. We walked through several crowded markets and, as usual, didn’t buy anything. We went to the top of the tower to get an amazing view of the city, and saw a two headed turtle at their animal park at the bottom. And, we watched New Zealand beat France to win the Rugby World Cup at a bar right next to a TGI Fridays (which we had regretfully accepted was the only place to watch it in the city and were about to go into before seeing the game on in the window of this place). It’s a small city, so we did lots of walking around, trying our best to cross off everything on the guidebook to do list and find some things of our own as well.
We brought laptops and picked a guesthouse with free wifi but the internet isn’t fast enough to do much. I had planned to upload a couple hundred photos from the last month and our past couple trips but the internet’s not letting me (it doesn’t even let me upload one photo to keep my picture-a-day blog updated). Those will go up when we get back to Bangkok next week (assuming that happens) – so expect a new batch of pictures sometime soon.
We miss everyone, leave comments or send us email updates to say hello!
Friday, October 28, 2011
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Tourists
Another 2 weeks have gone by! We've done some more touristy stuff...
This past weekend we went to Ko Samet, and island nearby. We took a bus about 3 hours from Bangkok then a 40 minute ferry to the island. It was beautiful and relaxing. We were on the west side of the island which is the quiet side away from town. The east side of the island is much busier (though it’s still a tiny island so not really that busy… just comparatively) and we hung out there a bit Saturday night. For the most part we just hung out at the beach and ate good food. I’ll put some pictures down below.
In other news… since the last post below I put up our first month’s pictures in a Picasa album, you can find them here. The weekend before Ko Samet we did some touristy stuff in Bangkok. We went to Wat Arun, one of the better known wats (wat means temple) in Bangkok, and one of the better known landmarks in Thailand. It’s named after Aruna, the Indian God of Dawn. It’s supposed to be most beautiful at dawn (and at dusk), but we haven’t seen it at those times. It was pretty cool during the day.
Last week, we also met a friend of a friend at a sky bar on the 25th floor of a building downtown. I think people here just refer to open air bars that are downtown on higher floors of buildings as sky bars. Maybe that happens other places too and I just don’t know about it. There was a great view, see below. This was only the 25th floor, one of the most popular ones in Bangkok, is on the 63rd floor of a building (and actually called Sky Bar) – scary! Also, the guy we met (Jacob’s Aunt’s former student’s wife’s friend from college!) grew up in Redwood City, what a small world!
Works going well, I’m adjusting and not overworking as much as I was the first couple weeks. Jacob’s making progress with his project and is really enjoying his work as well. We also just bought tickets last night to go to Kuala Lumpur. Kuala Lumpur is the capital and second largest (by population) city in Malaysia. The weekend Jacob needs to leave the country (because he’s on a tourist visa) coincided with a long holiday weekend I have for school so it worked out perfectly and we can leave the country together. We’ve just started looking into things to do while we’re there (a Friday through Monday), and it’s looking like it will be a great trip.
Wat Arun:
The sky bar:
Ko Samet:
This past weekend we went to Ko Samet, and island nearby. We took a bus about 3 hours from Bangkok then a 40 minute ferry to the island. It was beautiful and relaxing. We were on the west side of the island which is the quiet side away from town. The east side of the island is much busier (though it’s still a tiny island so not really that busy… just comparatively) and we hung out there a bit Saturday night. For the most part we just hung out at the beach and ate good food. I’ll put some pictures down below.
In other news… since the last post below I put up our first month’s pictures in a Picasa album, you can find them here. The weekend before Ko Samet we did some touristy stuff in Bangkok. We went to Wat Arun, one of the better known wats (wat means temple) in Bangkok, and one of the better known landmarks in Thailand. It’s named after Aruna, the Indian God of Dawn. It’s supposed to be most beautiful at dawn (and at dusk), but we haven’t seen it at those times. It was pretty cool during the day.
Last week, we also met a friend of a friend at a sky bar on the 25th floor of a building downtown. I think people here just refer to open air bars that are downtown on higher floors of buildings as sky bars. Maybe that happens other places too and I just don’t know about it. There was a great view, see below. This was only the 25th floor, one of the most popular ones in Bangkok, is on the 63rd floor of a building (and actually called Sky Bar) – scary! Also, the guy we met (Jacob’s Aunt’s former student’s wife’s friend from college!) grew up in Redwood City, what a small world!
Works going well, I’m adjusting and not overworking as much as I was the first couple weeks. Jacob’s making progress with his project and is really enjoying his work as well. We also just bought tickets last night to go to Kuala Lumpur. Kuala Lumpur is the capital and second largest (by population) city in Malaysia. The weekend Jacob needs to leave the country (because he’s on a tourist visa) coincided with a long holiday weekend I have for school so it worked out perfectly and we can leave the country together. We’ve just started looking into things to do while we’re there (a Friday through Monday), and it’s looking like it will be a great trip.
Wat Arun:
The sky bar:
Ko Samet:
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