Now I understand why people say when you are traveling alone, you have (a chance) to face your inner most fear and overcome it.

3 days ago, 16/05, I arrived in Sibu (a small town about 260,000 people)  at midnight. Caroline’s friend, a Foochow lady named Ms. Koh, picked me up and drove me downtown to find a guesthouse. Because it was quite late, I picked whatever hotel I could see. It was a big but run down hotel right in the centre of Sibu [Sorry to protect the business of the hotel, I can’t tell the name]. The Chinese man at the counter couldn’t speak so Koh helped me check in and left me in the room alone.

The corridor of the hotel

The first thing I did in the hotel was to check out the toilet. It didn’t work! The faucet and toilet flush didn’t work. I went down and asked the guy to come up with me to check. It worked! So he left and as I was preparing to take a shower, I heard someone turning on and off the faucet, and then flushed the toilet. Nobody else was in the room! I walked in and I saw water running. And then the toilet paper automatically scrolled. I was so scared, I ran down and tried to explain to the man but he couldn’t understand. I couldn’t check out because it was late and Sibu is very dangerous at night. So I came back to the room again and cried on Facebook. I didn’t dare the use the toilet or to shower. All weird sound stopped at 3am and I went to bed at 4am.

The haunted toilet

In the morning, I went down and met a Chinese lady at the counter. She speaks English. I told her the story and she asked what room I stayed. I said Room 405 and she said: “There is no Room 405 in this hotel.” It turned out that I stayed in Room 407 but somehow I thought that I stayed in Room 405. It was probably because the room next to me was 403. I still can’t understand why there is no Room 405 in this hotel. Is 405 a bad number in Chinese?

Sometimes having no plan at all is the best plan. Everything went smoothly for me today, except the fact that I left Brunei earlier than expected and ended up at a hotel much more expensive than expected. This morning, I followed Caroline Ang to Miri and guess what, it is the best time to visit Miri ever During this May, Miri celebrates its 5th year of being a city with a lot of festivals: Jazz Festival, OctoFest, etc. Miri at first wasn’t I didn’t manage to get in the Jazz Festival because all tickets were sold out. It turned out to be my luck because it was raining the whole evening. Both the parade and the festival got messed up.

2 hours drive from Bandar to Miri was a great chance for me to contemplate the beauty of Brunei. The sky is blue because of no pollution and you can see trees and jungles everywhere. So green and clean!

Sarawak is the only state of Malaysia that has its own administration. People, including Malaysians, need passports or travel documents in order to visit Sarawak. For those who don’t need a visa to enter Malaysia, it’s just another stamp on their passport. But for those who need a visa, remember apply for Sarawak visa when you apply for Malaysia visa if you plan to visit Sarawak. I didn’t even need to fill in the immigration form when crossing border from Brunei to Sarawak!

We arrived at around 2 and when to a local food court for lunch. It was a modest Chinese restaurant but food is awesome! I ordered Ikan Bilis Mee Hoon and Caroline, even though very picky, had to admit that it was nice.

After that, we proceeded to check in our hotel. Caroline’s friend booked us a very nice room in Imperial Hotel – way over my budget because all hotels were fully booked (some even over booked like Marriot) because of the Jazz Festival.

At 5pm, Charles, Caroline’s friend, came with Justin, a Canadian student at Curtin college in Miri, picked us up and our debauchery in Miri began.

Miri is quite small with only around 300,000 people. It takes you only half an hour to drive around the whole city. First, Charles took us to Canada hill. Nobody could explain why it was named Canada hill, but it was where the first oil rig (in Malaysia) was discovered. On top of Canada hill, there is a big miniature of the oil rig. From there, you can see the whole city with the beach.

After that, we went to a food court on the beach for satay and drinks.

Charles ordered us chicken & beef satay with mixed tea. I don’t know what’s the name of the drink but there are a lot of things inside: jelly, dried litchi, barley, etc. It tasted good.

And since I’m interested in the restaurant encroaching upon the sea, Charles took us there for a visit. The construction of Marina Bay, the name of the restaurant, wasn’t easy. Since it was built on sand, they had to revamped the foundation first, then wait for everything to deposit & solidify, then build the restaurant. The whole restaurant is made of wood delicately engraved by Indonesian workers. It’s really beautiful, however, my camera sucks in low light so I couldn’t take any nice picture. 2 pictures are from Marina Bay Restaurant’s fanpage, the next one is from here and the last 2 ones are taken by me. I’m just wondering why such a heavily invested restaurant with spectacular view could be so quiet.

We didn’t have dinner there but went for Meng Chai seafood restaurant instead. It’s a typical Chinese restaurant with awesome food.

Then we left for dessert at Citrus. We were all full after dinner but dessert was so good that we finished it right away. I don’t remember the name of the dessert, but it was the best dessert I’ve ever had. It’s made of banana cake, sweet sauce, banana, cream on a hot place.

I could barely walk because of my stuffed stomach when we went for a drink at Tiger Island. This pub locates in the area where most pubs & bars in Miri do. There I learnt to play some drink games like flipping the coin into the cup.

We came home at around 12, full and content. There is only 1 problem which is Caroline cannot sleep with the light on and I cannot sleep with the light off. Oii I hate my darkness phobia

My flight to Brunei is at 1pm tomorrow so I spent most of my time today preparing for the trip. It’s interesting to realize that the hardest part was actually making the decision, after that, everything will start to fall into its place. For example, when I decided to go to Brunei, I searched for people from Brunei on Facebook and I found Caroline Ang. She was very kind to agree to meet me yesterday and she turned out to be my life saver. She introduced me to a Malaysian magazine (I went for the interview this morning and got an offer but more on it later), offered me a place to stay in Brunei when she comes back there on 26, gave me a bunch of important contacts in Brunei as well as in Kuching. Because I want to catch up with her in Brunei and I want to attend the Jazz festival in Miri on Friday, I decided to change my plan a little bit. I will be in Brunei on 13th, then go to Miri on 14th by bus to attend the festival, and then travel around Sarawak and Sabah for 10 days and come back to Brunei on 26 or 27. I haven’t decided where to go after that, maybe go to Philippines or Indonesia by ferry if the ticket is cheap enough, or go back to KL and travel northward, cross the border to Thailand and then Myanmar. Any suggestion would be very helpful. Caroline even introduced me to Brunei’s first journalist. YES, I’m going to meet Brunei’s FIRST journalist! Thank you very much Caroline!

P/S Guess where am I blogging from? TNT Kickboxing Today is my last day here. I’m gonna miss this place so so much!

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Few weeks ago, after receiving quite a lot of positive feedbacks regarding my lighting talk about my boyfriend application joke (yes, the boyfriend application thing was a joke, please don’t take it serious. I’m not that desperate) at #BarCampKL, I was encouraged to give a talk about Malaysia: What I love and hate about this country.

Iris Khoo, a Malaysian friend of mine, was drinking water from a bottle, but right when she saw this topic, she turned to me and said:"You see this bottle? If you say anything not nice about Malaysia, it will be on your face." Of course she was joking, but my point is, I know even though a lot of you laugh at patriotism, you Malaysians still love your country and unless I’m superman or no brain man (they are the same actually), there is no way I dare to piss any of you off. What I’m gonna write below is my personal experience after 5 months mingling with a lot of people in Malaysia. And well, pointing out what I don’t like about Malaysia doesn’t mean that Vietnam or any country else is better.

What I like about Malaysia
A lot. One thing about traveling is that you can pretend to be whoever you like. When I meet a person that I think I will never see them again, I lie about my identity to observe people’s reaction or just to prove my point. [Some actually treat people from different countries differently.] I once told a Malaysian girl that I was from Singapore and she asked me why I came to Malaysia, I said that it was because I liked Malaysia more than Singapore (any Singaporean reader here please don’t kill me, it’s just a white lie). Malaysia is a very exciting country with a lot of smart people, business opportunities and interesting companies. Look at AirAsia – the world’s best low cost airlines, look at MOL – the company that bought Friendster or look at the Petronas Twin Towers! A lot of MNCs nowadays tend to choose Malaysia over Singapore for regional office because of low cost here.

People here are super friendly and most of them can speak English. It’s very easy for you to mingle with local people. I’ve followed my friends to some local parties/Malaysian houses without being invited and people treat me really well. Malaysia is a diverse country with 3 main different ethnic groups so people are very open to alien cultures. People usually think that I’m a Malaysian Chinese who cannot speak Malay rather a foreigner. FYI, a lot of Malaysians, esp. Chinese & Indian, cannot speak Malay.

Another great thing about Malaysia, especially KL is that there are many getaways just 1 or 2 hours driving from the city. You will never have to worry about being confined in a busy & stuffy city. For example, if you are in KL, you can go to Shah Alam to skytrex, Broga Hill for hiking, Sunway Lagoon for theme parks, Bagan Lalang for seafood, Pork Dickinson for a beach, Genting Highlands for gambling, etc.

What I dislike about Malaysia

I don’t like it when it’s so hard to travel around in KL
Yes, in KL, if you don’t have a car, you’re dead. There is public transportation but the train system can only cover a small part of KL and the bus here are so random. Roads in KL are all highways and there is no lane for bike or motorbike. If you ride one, there is high risk that you will get run over or get lost. Cab in Malaysia is cheap if you use meter taxi, only around RM1/km (that makes sense, local cars cheap and gasoline is dirt cheap here thanks to Petronas), but KL is so big that the distance from one place to another is usually from 15km-30km.

I don’t like it when KL rains all the time
No exaggeration, during my last 5 months here, KL rains almost everyday. The best part is that it always rains between 3pm and 9pm, exactly time when I want to go out. And since I don’t have a car, rain at that time means that I will have to stay at home and eat instant noodle. It makes me fat.
To make thing worse, my area gets flooded when it rains. Not safe for walking!

I don’t like it when taxi drivers try to fool me around
Another side effect of not having a car is that you will have to use cab, and well, half of the times taxi drivers in Malaysia will drive me mad. When I was new here and didn’t know the road, it’s normal for them to take me around. But even when I’m familiar with the road here, they can still fool me by pretending to take the wrong turn, taking traffic jam as an excuse to go on a much longer way. A Malaysian friend mine (yeah, he’s Malaysian) fell asleep on a cab on the way from Sunway Pyramid to Kelana Jaya and the meter jumped to RM34 for the distance that normally costs RM8-10.

I don’t like it when teenagers use weird characters to type Bahasa Malayu (BM)
BM or Malay language is the official language in Malaysia. It’s considered one of the most consistent languages and easiest languages to learn. However, Malaysian teenagers don’t seem to be happy with that, they try to complicate it with number, special characters, random abbreviation, mixed English, etc. which makes it impossible for me when I try to use Google Translate or dictionary to understand or to learn.

I don’t like it when some Malaysians can never be on time
Yes, Malaysians are notorious for never being on time! My friends told me that to be Malaysian, I’d have to eat nasi lemak, add "ar, lah" in the end of every sentence and always be late. The worst thing is that being late is like a norm here so people won’t even bother to let you know by calls or sms if they are going to be late.

I don’t like it when food in Malaysia is too oily
YES IT IS! Food at mamak (Indian restaurants) are super oily with all kinds of sauce. I try to avoid mamak whenever I can. Malay food is also fat. The most popular Malay food is "nasi lemak" which literally means "fat rice". I love Chinese food though.

You might need a reason to hate something, but you don’t need any reason to love it. For many untold reasons, I love Malaysia! It’s a great country that I think anyone should definitely visit. During my last 5 months here, I’ve received a lot of random kindness that can make me smile for the whole day. I will blog about it soon