02.05.09 Malaysia

In the morning it was time to leave Macau behind us and we took a taxi to the airport after a bakery breakfast. The airplane took us to Kota Kinabalu, which is on the Borneo Island side of Malaysia. And with the swine flu going around, we had to fill out health declaration forms and they sprayed some really awful smelling disinfectant thing in the plane before landing that made my breathing a little hard.

From the airport in Kota Kinabalu, we took a small bus to downtown. The bus was filled with writing on the chairs and it looked like the typical bus you could imagine seeing in Vietnam or somewhere. The bus dropped us off near a Mandarin Hotel where we decided to get a room. After leaving our stuff in the room we went to look for dinner.

We went to a food court sort of thing for food, where you could pick your seafood from the tanks and they would catch them and cook them for you. They also had a show there with different ethnic dresses and dancing and music. Before the show and during it, we were talking about the differences in Asian and Finnish culture. There was a stage in the middle of the food court and there were children running around the stage with their parents. The performers actually had to wait for the children and their parents to get off the stage some times, so that they could perform their show. In Finland, people would be so embarrassed to get on the stage and be on the performers way, but here they didn't seem to mind it at all.

After the dinner, we went to get snacks from a shop and walked around the town a little bit. In China you are left alone, meaning that no one will say hello to you or anything like that, they will just stare. But in Malaysia people were yelling behind you all the time, which was kind of annoying.

After walking around it was time to go back to the hotel and get some sleep in our deluxe wide bed, where all the three of us slept. A true siskonpeti :)