'I' On Malaysia

Earlier this month, Toys’R'Us Malaysia (and other countries in the region) were running a competition to win a trip to the Cybertron Con 2010 being held from July 30th to August 3rd in Shanghai.  All you had to do was spend RM100 for an entry and write down a slogan finishing the sentence ‘I love Transformers because…’ in no more than 15 words.

Towards the end of June, Wendy and I had our first experience of an activity known as ‘Hashing‘.  A 70 year old activity originating from right here in Kuala Lumpur that spread through the world and led us towards spending 6 hours of a Saturday evening anywhere up to knee deep in mud.

The middle of August marked Wendy’s xx^th birthday (xx will change depending on the day, not the year!  ), and to celebrate I booked us a nice relaxing spa day and dinner around Mid Valley Gardens with Sage Restaurant being the highlight of the night…  Two days before that though, plans changed and we booked tickets and hotels to spend the weekend in Singapore instead!

After having had a bad encounter with a vending machine whilst leaving Melbourne last month, I thought I’d never see the money that the vending machine stole from me again.  It turns out that the company behind the vending machine is actually quite decent and they even sent me a refund for the amount I lost that evening.

9 months ago, we booked flights to Melbourne as part of one of AirAsia’s free seats promotions, so all in all it cost us RM2,350 for two return tickets which isn’t at all bad considering the cost of some other operators.

Alright, so this is the deal.

Greg has posted entries about Shanghai, and I am responsible to blog about HK & England. But my memory is beginning to fail me, I can’t remember day 1 day 2 etc details the way he can.

So…  I am going to tell the story my way… giving you only the highlight bits.

The last day of touring before heading to Shanghai for some, well, shopping and dumplings – is in Hangzhou.  Home to a large lake, lots of temples and a huge tea plantations…

The day got off to a bit of a cold and gloomy start so we were all wrapped up in our woolliest attire, and the scenery was all wrapped up in its cloudiest attire too.  Temples on the hillsides that would normally make for good photo opportunities just looked like temple shaped silhouettes in a black and white picture.  Pictures taken of West Lake didn’t come out much better either – the boat ride on the lake that we started off with was also cut short for some reason too, so Hangzhou wasn’t looking all that promising.

The tour of Suzhou continued on the second day of our trip with visits to Tiger Hill and the ‘Leaning Tower of China’ or Yunyan Pagoda.  This leaning tower is older than the more famous Leaning Tower of Pisa though and has a lot of history surrounding it, much more than Pisa.  Having said that, the tower itself wasn’t all that impressive and I much preferred the scenery surrounding the tower than I did the tower itself and taking pictures of the surroundings with the tower in the background makes for much better visuals in my opinion.

A few months ago, Wendy’s family invited me to go to Shanghai with them over Xmas and into the New Year (which I ended up calling a ‘Chinese New Year’), with a few days to travel around some scenic areas called Suzhou and Hangzhou to see places like the water village and gardens.  After sorting out visas and changing schedules to cut the flight prices down by RM600 per person (by flying down to Singapore instead of directly to China, believe it or not), the day arrived for us to head off to the land where fake is normal and everything has an association to the colour red.