Well I know its been a while since my last post, and thats because I couldn't get a good internet connection in order to tell you all about my last week! Last time I wrote I was in Shanghai so to finish that up we spent the day on Tuesday visiting two schools with varying amounts of students and then headed to the airport for Kuala Lumpur.
We arrived in KL late at night and took the KLIA express in to city sentral where we were staying. We ended up just grabbing dinner and heading to bed. On Wednesday we met up with the AEO tour (Bob Tour) for our visits to two international schools and one university. It was a nice day but the highlight was hearing Bob's stories from the Vietnam War on. Some of them are so bizarre that they just must be true. He is our own Forrest Gump.
I have been asked to describe KL and Malaysia since most of the people I know have not had the chance to visit. For this trip I was the most excited about visiting KL and Bangkok because I didn't know much about it! Guess what? Malaysia is exactly like Singapore! I don't know what I was thinking, they are on the same island and only hours apart by car, so I don't know what I was expecting Malaysia to be like. But for those of you who have not been to Singapore either, Malaysia is a very tropical country with lots of palm trees, very well built up (I have pictures of the Petronas Towers which I will put up as soon as I get them on the computer), they have been heavily influenced by the british as a lot of the english accents are U.K. accents and they drive on the left side of the road. Unfortunately we were only there for 24 hours as we left that afternoon to head to Bangkok. By 10p.m. we were in our hotel in Bangkok which actually is not that bad as all I have heard about Bangkok is the bad traffic and hot, humid heat.
Bangkok has been awesome. This is the first city that I have had free time in and its been over a week and a half in Asia. Thursday and Friday combined, Matt, Rich and I visited 5 schools (unfortunately the way I scheduled them, we took a taxi from one side of the city to the other, then back again, each way taking at least an hour). On Thursday night we invited 9 counselors to dinner at a restaurant that was recommended to me by none other than the famous Emily Hopwood. Boy does she know her stuff because everyone was raving about "The Blue Elephant" prior to our dinner and everyone was still raving about it after dinner. It was a great first introduction for me to a number of the schools around Bangkok, and gave me a chance to really get to know them in a better way than just 15 minutes before our visits. The food was amazing too. Our table of counselors did it the right way by ordering a bunch of different dishes and sharing them all; we had Penang Kai (chicken in a yellow curry) Black Curry Chicken (really hot but good!), lime curry seabass (the fish is really good here), duck, Thai lamb massaman (lamb is really popular here, I definitely like it!) and of course the most famous which we had to get, pad thai. This was an awesome way to try a bunch of really good, really thai dishes and I loved everyone one of them! We finished off with a Thai specialty dessert Mango sticky rice which is steamed rice with coconut milk (makes it really sweet) over a fresh piece of Mango, yum!!! All in all not a bad evening, really great conversation with the counselors and really great food!
Matt, Rich and I are off to the Palace and Wat Po so I'll talk about our Friday events later today when I get back (sneak peek, there was a thai massage!)...
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