Day 345 - Malaysia and 6 Month Anniversary

Malaysia was amazing!

Getting out to the camp site was not a fun time involving a bumpy, scary plane ride to get out to the east cost. Once we arrived, there was a stomach-turning car ride to get to our boat, which sped us up the river to the camp site. Along the way, we saw lots of monkeys and birds. Later that night, we saw crocodiles, flying foxes, and the next day we even spotted wild orang-utans! While trekking, we were able to get up close to sleeping kingfishers and a whip scorpion. Definitely cool. Not so cool? The fire ants.

Camping itself was crazy times. I hardly got any decent sleep from the variety of noises and the animals drifting around and in our door-less camping hut. Monkeys roamed the camp site one night and rats scurried around the entire time.

The Malaysian guides were awesome and hilarious. The other travelers were also cool -- everybody had a different story. One night I shared a beer with a New Zealander who was cycling around SE Asia and we swapped stories about teaching in Korea while a German doing contract work in Kuala Lumpur told us about the last time he'd visited Borneo during the flood season. Really interesting people.

The pictures are pretty amazing, so I'm disappointed that I'm still stuck with this school connection and a proxy... someday I'll dump a bunch of photos.


Today also marks Doyup and my 6 month anniversary. I can't believe it's been that long, but time in general seems to go quickly in Korea. I've been here nearly a year but it certainly doesn't feel like it! Last year at this time, I was stressing about cramming both my Korean language skills and my suitcases. I was stressed about finding appropriate school and leisure wardrobe and excited to meet my homestay family.

Now, I'm carefully considering what I *won't* put in my suitcases to keep them as empty as possible when I visit home next month. I'm signing up for the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK) at the beginning of July and counting down the days until I move out of my homestay and into an apartment. I almost never wear the expensive teaching clothes I carefully picked out, opting more often to put on whatever's lying on my bed (usually jeans and a sweatshirt, although I'm dressing nicer in the warm weather now since my summer clothes are almost exclusively sundresses).

That got a little off topic, but whatever.