Celebrating with Tiger beer and pineapples (Dec. 31/08 - Kuching, Borneo, Malaysia)

We spent this last day of 2008 exploring Kuching and making plans for our next days on Borneo. Several streets in town are jam packed with Malaysian and Chinese food stalls and shops, so we wandered up and down some of them, admiring the beautiful fabrics and trying to figure out what some of the random and unidentifiable packaged items were for sale as snack food. One guy had a hardware store set up, and on the top of his pile of door mats for sale was one of the Vancouver Canucks logo! Random! (And who would buy that here?!) We found a shop selling cheap clothes, so Ken grabbed a couple pairs of socks to replace the ones he accidently threw out last week, plus a tube of Colgate toothpaste for the equivalent of 30 cents. We're loving the prices of everything here - it's a foreign concept to us that you really can live on $25 a day! Again for lunch we played the blind ordering game, and this time ended up with two plates of "mee goreng" noodle that the lady whipped up in about a minut. The bill? $2.00.

Seeing as we hadn't touched base with family lately, we found a phone that worked and talked to our families for a while, hearing all about the record breaking snowfall we're missing at home. What a contrast to our 35°C and 90% humidity!

By the time we made it to the far end of town, we were getting tired, so we made a loop back through the Sarawak Museum (Sarawak being the state of southern Borneo) and then headed back for an air-conditioned-comfort afternoon nap. Ahh, the joys of being on vacation!

We found ourselves back in Chinatown for dinner, sitting down at the last free table at the only place that seemed to be open. It happened to be directly across the street from what can only be described as the loudest Chinese auction you could imagine! We had no idea what they were selling, but about 200 people were clustered around tables eating dinner while the auctioneer screamed the bids into the microphone. The best part was, "SOLD" was accompanied by the clanging of a giant gong. Anyway, live entertainment! It turned out that the restaurant only had one option for dinner - chicken and rice - so we placed our orers and listened to the show. Dinner turned out to be deep fried chicken wings (blech) with a pile of rice. We had to laugh at the sign in front of the Hilton advertising their New Year's Eve dinner for $80 per person. Ours was about $2.50 and potentially much more memorable!

We rang in 2009 with cold Tiger beers and fresh pineapple for dessert on the waterfront of the Sarawak River, watching the fireworks and thinking fondly of all that has happened in the last year. 2009 will surely be a memorable year for us, and it's already off to a winning start - exploring exotic places with your best friend that you never thought you would visit. Best wishes to all our family and friends, and may 2009 be filled with happy memories and great adventures!