Malaysia was just… a blast.

In somewhat chronological order:

• Buying 12 donuts to take to Malaysia from Melbourne airport.
• Playing DoTA with cousins in some random internet cafe/gaming lounge.
• Riding a bike (sans helmet) across the streets of Sitiawan, both with a cousin and alone, to another cousin’s house to steal borrow his internets.
• Having a bus breakdown in the middle of nowhere, and being stuck there for hours. Having a greasemonkey (in the purest sense of the word, literally covered in grease from head to toe) climb into the engine bay and fix it for us some three hours later.
• Eating copious amounts of food in restaurants packed to the brim with people also celebrating Chinese New Year.
• Buying four decks of cards for a couple of Australian dollars in order to play such games like Warlords and Scumbags, Cheat, Hold Em’ poker, Blackjack, and other assorted games for which there are no english translations for.
• Finding out that two of the most popular shopping centres have seemingly shed a complete level of floor space, but also discovering that there’s now a whopping great big Tesco where there definitely wasn’t one before.
• Marvelling at how awesome battery life is on the iPhone 4 when you don’t have to be connected to mobile networks.
• Tasting the local KFC, finding it definitely isn’t as good as it is back home, but at the same time appreciating the cheesy wedges which aren’t available back home either.
• Consuming many slices of bread for lunch while at the same cousin’s house. Pretty sure I cleaned them out, but they had such an exquisite collection of spreads it was hard not to.
• Watching episodes of Nip/Tuck before sleeping.
• Playing and reviewing iOS games before actually going to sleep.
• Realising that the whole experience was infinitely better with almost all of my cousins there as well. I suspect it would have been quite boring otherwise.
• Finding and commenting on all the broken English spotted in department stores, printed text, and everywhere.
• Taking special trips to speciality cake shops to buy speciality foods with a special cousin.
• Packing a serious amount of activities into one and a half days in Penang.
• Walking across a four lane highway in order to get to the newly almost-completely-abandoned shopping mall on the other side, only to realise that sitting at the Starbucks would be a far more productive use of my time while waiting for my sister to get her hair done.
• Paying a visit to every Toys’R’Us in every shopping mall to see what the stock of Nerf guns was like.
• Occasionally buying a Nerf gun from Toys’R’Us.
• Spending a large majority of the trip thinking about getting a local SIM card for mobile data only to end up never actually getting one and spending the entirety of the trip constantly worrying about where and when my next Wi-Fi hit would be like the internet-addicted druggie I am.
• Obsessively unlocking my iPhone, tapping Settings, Wi-Fi, and looking for unlocked Wi-Fi networks to steal bandwidth from.
• Taking photos. Of everything. Occasionally wishing I had some more serious hardware than just an iPhone 4.
• Enduring hours of car travel on the way to Kuala Lumpur.
• Paying the equivalent of $20 Australian dollars for wireless internet access for three devices — MacBook, iPhone, iPod touch.
• Walking the entire Mid Valley Megamall in an afternoon. Going back the next day to check things out a little more thoroughly.
• Checking out the new Garden Mall. Being impressed at all the super-upper-class stores there, how clean the whole place was, how cool the touch-screen maps were, how old-school the Gap logo looked at the Gap store…
• Stuffing a million things into shopping baskets to take back home. Being unsure if any of it would actually make it back. Consuming half of it in the hotel.
• Breaking down over the fact that we never got to catch the KLIA train that takes you between terminals. Maintenance, apparently. On the plus side, we did travel to KLIA on the KLIA Express, supposedly the fastest train in South-East Asia.
• Watching movies on the plane on the way back.
• Arriving in Melbourne somewhat tired due to the red-eye the night before. Being immensely cranky at everything.
• Buying 36 Krispy Kreme donuts to bring back to Hobart.

Realised I should probably write about epic stuff more often. Malaysia 2011 falls into that category, but so does Brisbane 2010. That’s for another time.