Kuala Lumpur

I admit, for the last few days in KL I was so busy, I forgot to blog! Our last company visit of the trip was to the United States Embassy, but it was very unimpressive. The people we met with had all worked there for less than a year, and one of them had only been there for 4 weeks! They showed us a powerpoint containing information from the CIA World Factbook website, which we all had read before the trip, so the presentation was basically just very boring. It was embarrassing that these people were living and working in Malaysia and had absolutely no excitement or passion for it. Our main host kept telling us that he didn't know anything about politics because he has a degree in music composition.

Aside from the US Embassy, we did a lot of other fun things in our last few days in KL. We went to the zoo, we saw the new X-men movie at a nearby theater, went shopping, and ate dinner at some really good places. We went to the Moroccan restaurant near our hotel at least 3 times for their hookah and their hummus and kebabs. And on our last night in KL, one of Dr. Karuppan's friends took us out for Indian food. The Indian food was so good, but so spicy!! We were all drinking tons of water the whole time to get rid of the burn!

The zoo seemed kind of similar in size to the Dickerson park zoo in Springfield, but I could be wrong. It was really dirty and there were a ton of bugs, but the animals were really active and really close to the walls so we could see almost every animal! We ended up watching a show at the zoo with seals and birds doing tricks, but the entire program was in Malay, so we didn't understand any of it. An interesting tidbit of Malaysian culture - sweet corn in a cup counts as a snack here, you can find it at movie theaters, the zoo, KFC, and tons of other places, right next to popcorn, sodas, and ice cream. They even gave us corn flavored ice cream one time, and it actually had real pieces of sweet corn in it!