OUT OF ORDER: Back From Malaysia

Greetings! So we just got back from our 5 day excursion to Malaysia! It was...an interesting and unexpected experience. We weren't expecting to spend so much of our time in a tour bus, and we had a CRAZY tour guide named Francis. He has become our new scape goat - his accent and overuse of the word "whereby" in inappropriate grammatical scenarios, not to mention his sexism, patronization, and cultural insensitivity - made him the perfect butt of many jokes.

In spite of Francis and the aggravations inherent in having to do what a bus driver and an insane Malay-Chinese man told us to do, the trip threw us some curve balls. The biggest thing that came out of it is an overwhelming sense of group solidarity. After so many hours together on a bus (it took 18 hours from the time we left the hotel in Malaysia to the time we got back to our dorms in Singapore yesterday, and that was just one day), we have all bonded A LOT. We played a lot of games - card games, word games, picture games, "never-have-I-ever," spontaneous a cappella karaoke - and had lots of meaningful (as well as some not-so-meaningful) talks about all kinds of things, from religion and our dream futures to our dislike of Francis and our love of being silly.

I think I'm going to post a picture album on another site and then link it from the blog, instead of doing the picture/word blogs I've been doing thus far. I'll post a few blogs here describing what we did, though. And then eventually, I'll hopefully make up all of the days I never blogged before leaving...