PenangMalaysia Trip:
Kean Lee a guy from work took me to the other side of the island to Batu Ferringhi. It sounds like a big Star Trek convention but it’s just a bunch of "Hawker" food and street venders. I guess Hawker is a people, like Gypsies, but famous for food not for steeling your children. We found the black market DVD’s and I bought the re-release of Bambi for the kids for a dollar. We’ll see how it works. We ate all kinds of good and interesting food, the coolest was a 100 year old egg, or “country egg”, I took some pictures, it was pretty amazing looking, and not half bad. As far as finding something that Sarah the kids would like…well, all the clothes are American brands albeit knock-off’s, no local brands or anything.
The Muslim guy’s are singing their prayers outside right now, reminds me of Israel. Driving around here is scary, well driving myself would be crazy but riding along is bad as well. They drive on the wrong side of the road and every once in a while I’ll get startled when I look up and see that were on the wrong side of the road. The motorcycles are like flies, it looks like they are constantly in a motocross race, swerving in and out of traffic and passing cars on either side. The drivers here even make Israelis look like good drivers. I went out to lunch with the guy's from work every day to some new place. It was all good food but I’ll never remember the names of any of it. I ventured out at night and went poking around one of the shopping malls close by. Again nothing great, I got a waffle cone with chocolate and mint ice-cream. I don’t think it’s that they have great ice-cream here in south east Asia (I remember the ice-cream in the Philippines as being really good too) it’s just that when it’s as hot as it is any ice-cream is great. The language sounds familiar like they are all speaking Pig-Tagalog or something. Reading the signs I can tell a lot of the words are similar. It’d be fun to spend enough time here to learn the language. Anyway it was a fun trip, other than getting there and coming home. If any of you ever fly to Asia try to get a Singapore-Air flight, they are great compared to any other I’ve been on.

Aaron

Hi Everyone! We have been having a super time at Grandma and Grandpa's house this week! Arwen and Noah both love the kitties to death! They love to play with Uncle Josh. He does a good job (unless he has to share a precious treasure, you know!) Noah finally loves everyone and will let them hold him. I hardly ever even see Arwen, she is so busy having fun! Yesterday we a really fun tea party. Grandma went to Berry's and got lots of really fun, yummy treats for it. She made us homemade hot chocolate with whipped cream and little baby cookies. Both Noah and Arwen ate none of their dinner, probably because the treats were at the table, tempting them. When tea party time came along, they had so much fun.

We went down to the public swim center on Saturday for it’s grand re-opening and went swimming (it was free) with 1000 dirty kids. They have this giant kiddy pool and we splashed around with the kids. The kiddy pool is kept at like 85º but skin and bones Noah was blue lipped and shivering after a few minutes. Arwen will need to relearn all her swimming bravery this summer, but she had fun. Noah just broke a glass full of water and though it was the greatest thing, naughty little boy. Arwen was assigned to give the closing prayer in primary next week and was very proud of it, I forgot that Sarah would be in California, the poor little girl cried and cried when she had to give it back. Sarah finally got her new couches, they actually look good, and we were able to give our old couch away easy enough. They are the same easy clean (we’ll see about that) microfiber type couches that Matthew and Bethany have. I’ll be heading off to Penang Malaysia (just below Thailand and above Singapore) this Friday, I’m not looking forward to the jet lag, but it’ll be fun to check out a new country.

Love,

NASA