January 6, 2011
Happy Ukrainian Christmas!
It has already been 6 days in 2011. That is so hard to grasp! Only six days ago I was in Malaysia under the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. But we have already had five days at our newest home, with 20 kids and the amazing lady who is in charge of them all. It seems strange both ways!
If you haven’t heard, we celebrated New Years in Malaysia. We flew out the 31 and came back the first and celebrated with probably 100, 000 Malaysians. The Petronas towers are a huge landmark so we headed straight for them when we arrived in Kuala Lumpur
The airport is an hour drive from the actual city
There wasn’t any direct way to get to the towers from where we were
And there isn’t 24 hour service on the public transit, even with New Years.
So we improvised and checked our options and got help from a great man in McDonalds… and ended up on a bus to the center of the city for only two euro. That was MUCH cheaper than we expected so we were very happy with that. Once at the central station it wasn’t difficult to get someone to explain how to get to the towers by LRT (funny story, their public transit is called both an LRT and Skytrain- mixing my Edmonton and Vancouver vocabulary). Thankfully Malaysians speak English much more fluently than Indonesians, or at least the ones we meet! And there were more white people in the capital so we didn’t get stared at as often which we were very thankful for. We caught one LRT to the towers, stepped out of the subway station and Art and Janka needed to kiss the ground. That made the taxi drivers look!
The towers… super cool! They actually were featured in a movie with Catherine Zeta Jones and Sean Connery in the 90’s. You can bet that I’m going to watch that movie when I get home. Janka felt like a secret agent the whole night. However, you can’t really go up the towers, so we just looked up at them. At the bottom is a huge shopping center, probably four or five levels, and it is very high class. They had great designer labels, and we quickly realized that this is not somewhere we are going to get deals on anything. However, I found my first English bookstore in months. I felt so at home. I could have stayed for hours, even just reading kids books! And Janka had her first Starbucks ever, which was a pretty great place to do it. We had a huge fountain in front of us and the towers beside us and more sky scrapers surrounding. We really just spent the day in that immediate area. It got more and more full during the evening with people who were waiting for the new years countdown. Unfortunately, they hadn’t really put any effort into a program or anything… there were some drummers, but I didn’t even hear a countdown over the loudspeakers, but that might have just been because everyone was being super loud even three minutes before the clock changed. And there were fireworks, which was nice. We even could see more fireworks in the distance. It was just nice to have the four of us celebrating together, and to be on this adventure together.
After the fireworks we waited around, as we knew that we couldn’t get on a bus back to the airport until 3:15 so we had plenty of time to kill. Miraculously, Alex got a skype call through some very temperamental wifi we were trying to connect to. We took a train back to the central station around two and ate some McD’s and found some better wifi. Then got on our bus back finally at 3:30. Now I was completely out on the bus ride, but everyone else said it was a rollercoaster ride. Apparently they were worried for their lives. But I got a nice hour of shut eye. At the airport we got through security thinking we could sleep at the gate. That didn’t work very well for a couple reasons, but the biggest was the extreme air conditioning. You don’t expect to be shivering here, but that definitely was close! So we slept a little, got on the plane very groggily at seven and headed back to Indonesia. Now, if you have been paying attention you can see that I’ve gotten maybe two hours of sleep when I get on the plane, then I got two more on the plane… so I was tired when we arrived. We all were. But I think that the trip was worth it. I even got to skype with friends from home on the first, when it was new years in Canada, which was really a treat. I hadn’t talked to most of them since I left, so it was really good to catch up a tiny bit, even if it was hard to see the celebration I was missing.
So now it is 2011. I definitely will remember this year. And I realize that I haven’t said anything about my week in this post. I guess next time!
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