A little taste of life here...

First of all we live in a jungle. The weather is always warm, and somewhat unpredictable. You can walk into class believing it is going to be a beautiful sunny day, only to realize minutes later that there are rain drops streaming down the windows. Instead of pine trees, there are palm trees everywhere. However, Palm trees aren’t the only constant scenery around here. There is something else that we have found in every corner of Malaysia as well… cats!! Now, we are not just talking about a couple stray cats here and there. You will see cats outside of classrooms… or we even got to witness a classroom that had 4 kittens in it, and at food stalls right at your feet while your eat. On one occasion we were walking down a busy road trying to watch out for cars when Shannon yelled some sort of profanity and jumped five feet in the air. I’m going to let you guess what was laying dead right at her feet. So, the insane amount of cats EVERYWHERE is something we are trying to get used to.

Another difference is that people don’t tip here. I guess that they figure it into your bill for you, which is nice. However, the places we eat around campus never give you a check. Around campus you can find a plethora of food stalls selling any kind of ethnic food your heart desires, except western. We call them food stalls, because they are not restaurants. Most of the seating is outside on pavement, and a majority of them don’t even have names or menus. We have tried many different kinds of foods at these places. We usually try to at least go by the policy ‘one bite to be polite’ as we have tried Chinese, Arabic, and Indian. However, we found a place that makes food from Pakistan that we LOVE! This adorable man makes us our chicken wings, wraps, and Nan. The stall next to this place makes the most unbelievable apple juice in the world!! Whenever, we walk in they just giggle and start making it for us. It is absolutely delicious and we have been plotting about how we are either going to bring the man who makes this back to the US with us, or steal his stuff. Either way we know we will never be able to live life again to the fullest without it! Thankfully, we have found some other comfort food as well. There is a little café that we frequently visit for garlic toast and mash potatoes. The mash potatoes come from something that looks like a smoothie machine, but we really can’t complain because it tastes good. Also, Shannon probably eats somewhere between 4 to 5 packages of Mentos a day. Seriously, she is hardly ever seen without a pack in her hand!

Okay so onto classes… yes we are actually going to school here as well. Classes are two hours long, and twice a week we have class for 6 hours straight! Our notebooks are already filled with notes to each other that read… “I am so bored I could poke my eyes out” or “seriously what has been happening for the past hour?” We have American History and Malay together. Shannon is taking Accounting as well, and Meghan is taking moral education. We are the only two people in our Malay class. Our teacher doesn’t really speak English and we don’t really speak Malay. So, communication can be hard, but we all get some pretty good laughs out of it. Are favorite thing to say of now are jumpa lagi or selamat jalan!

A couple of other things about the culture here are that people don’t have TV’s in their dorm rooms or even in the buildings! Also as far as we can tell people don’t hang out in each other’s rooms… very different from American dorms. Sadly, there is no One Tree Hill here. Oh and the driving. There are lines on the roads, but the taxi drivers appear to believe that they are optional. The cars are a lot smaller, and they drive a lot faster!

Now, for the MOST IMPORTANT aspect of life here, the people! We have meet people from all over the world! We know people from Pakistan, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, India, Iran, Yemen, Italy, China, Indonesia, and Thailand just to name a few. We have learned more about different cultures in the past two weeks, then our past twenty years! A majority of the student population around us is fasting for Ramadan. From what we understand this means that people can’t listen to music, smoke, drink, or eat until the sun goes down. So, as you can imagine the energy level around here increases drastically around 7:30. We have had many conversations about Islam, and a friend is even going to take us through the parts of the Koran. It is refreshing to hear about this religion directly instead of the skewed media perception. We have also met several people who have parents working for the governments around the world. With their help we now have an inside view into the political workings of places like Yemen and Pakistan. Malaysia has some interesting things happening within its government as well, but that is harder to get opinions on because you can get in trouble here for speaking poorly of the government. There are three main ethnic groups that make up the population of Malaysia; Indian, Chinese, and native Malay people. From our experiences we have gathered that there is a lot of animosity towards the native Malay people. For instance, they have to take an exam before attending college and even if the Malay people get lower scores they are still more likely to get into colleges and receive financial help. They also don’t like to intermix too much. Most people stick to their own ethnic group. However, most people aren’t very shy about meeting us. For the first time in our lives we are the minority. There are 5,000 students on this campus and only one other American. We could be at a gas station, eating dinner, on the beach, or just sitting outside and people will randomly come up to us and ask us where we are from. It is a little weird when people ask us if they can take pictures with us as if we are some kind of freak show. Honestly, we think that some of the locals and even some of the college students have never even seen Americans. Needless to say we aren’t in Kansas anymore. This experience is definitely culturally enriching, and we are gaining so much from being submersed in the variety of cultures happening around us!

We hope this has given you some insight into life in Malaysia! Don’t forget to keep in touch! Lots of Love!