Hooray for my lazy eating habits!

Wow, things have been busy!  I'm in Kuala Lumpur now in the dorm room where I'll be living for the rest of the summer.  Since the last update, we've covered Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Penang, Malaysia.  Obviously, I have some catching up to do on this blog!  I've been procrastinating on posting until I could catch up but finally decided I'd just post about Malaysia, then I'll try and write some posts on the other places later, so they'll just have to be a little out of order.

We just got back from our site visit to Lake Kenyir in a rural part of Malaysia.  Lake Kenyir is around an 8 hour drive from Kuala Lumpur.  Our site is a small peninsula on the lake where we'll be designing an eco-resort and information center.  We stayed at a resort on the lake for the weekend, which seemed like it was going to be nice, then proceeded to give a third of the class food poisoning.  People sometimes make fun of me for being a lazy eater (i.e. not cooking, not eating crab because it isn't worth the effort, avoiding shrimp if it has the shell, not eating watermelon because the seeds are annoying to deal with, etc) but this time my laziness saved me.  We think the culprit was some bad seafood that was served by our hotel, but I didn't eat the seafood because it didn't seem worth the effort to take the mussels out of their shells.  Most people who ate it were throwing up and ended up at the sketchy clinic with IV's because they got so dehydrated.  We ended up cutting the trip slightly short so people could come back, visit the university hospital, and get some rest.

However, despite that site visit, I'm enjoying Malaysia so far.  It seems like there's a lot to explore so I'll try and do as much exploring as I can in the next month.  We've already explored a number of the malls in Kuala Lumpur, a city of malls.  People seem to love malls because they're air conditioned and will go there just to hang out.  We have a few that are a cheap cab ride away, so we've been checking them out.  Besides the malls, we went on a short half-day tour of Kuala Lumpur, but I definitely need to go back to all the places we saw.  The goal is not to get to get sucked into the mentality that since I live here, I don't need to rush to see things.  That's how you end up back at home realizing you missed a bunch of stuff and can't figure out where all the time went.

Anyway, I have posts written for Beijing and Shanghai, so I'll try and upload them soon.  Since we won't be traveling as much, maybe I'll find more time to update this.