Malaysia is a country that I had never dreamt of visiting before this trip, but I’m glad I did. Our port city, Penang, is an island and if you look for it on a map you might find George Town which is on the mainland. The first day I did an island orientation trip with SAS in which we visited a Buddhist pagoda, a snake temple and a botanical garden that featured free range monkeys. For dinner I went to a fish market that was also a large restaurant. They had tanks full of Australian lobsters and huge emperor crabs that where white and their bodies where the size of a football. Not to mention a vast array of other fish and other edible aquatic life including Canadian geoduck (it’s weird, look it up). I got a Malaysian dish but played it safe with the grilled honey chicken, which was pretty delicious. The next morning I was off to Singapore, a sovereign island nation state that is southeast of Malaysia. Singapore is known as a “fine” city as in there are a lot of fines for things like spitting out chewing gum, littering, jay walking and you can even be put to death for drug possession. In addition to fines and standard prison sentences they still practice caning where you are systematically beaten across the back with a cane that has been soaked in antiseptic fluid. There is always a doctor and nurse present during the procedure and if they feel that the person can’t take anymore they will stop and let you heal. However they may extend your prison sentence in order to dispense the proper amount of strokes as determined by the judge at sentencing with a maximum of 24. While this seems draconian, it actually works. I felt very safe in Singapore; there is almost no violent crime and less than 0.4% unemployment. Singapore is a very modern and very western. Everyone spoke English very well. Singapore is a highly developed business hub and has a bustling financial district. Singapore even has its own air force, although don’t have a base in Singapore they have one in Australia and they even send their pilots to Texas and New Mexico were they have training facilities. One of my favorite parts of Singapore was Clarke Quay [Key]. Similar to the riverwalk in San Antonio there are a lot of good restaurants and nightlife on this part of the Singapore River. One of the places was called the Clinic were people sat in wheelchairs and drank their “medicine” from hanging IV bags. This might sound strange but I think that its fair to say that Singapore feels like the future.
