Trip to Kuala Lumpur!

So we took our first trip out of Singapore last weekend. We took a bus to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on friday morning and a bus home on sunday night. About 35 exchange students all booked the same bus and same hotel. For the first trip, it was a lot of fun to have everyone together, but it wasn't always convenient. We did a lot of standing around waiting for people and wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what to do with our time there. We'll definitely be traveling in smaller packs from now on, but it was a great first weekend!
These are the famous Petronas Towers. Our 5-star hotel was only a couple blocks away from them and it only cost us about $30USD/night! The towers are impressive during the day but truly amazing at night. I've never seen a building light up the way they do and i don't think pictures can do it justice.
We did some shopping in Chinatown. They were asking RM75 for a pair of sunglasses i wanted, but we bargained them down to RM20! (RM20 = about $6USD). We also climbed 272 stairs to enter the Batu Caves. There were wild monkeys everywhere, and they weren't shy. They would run up to the tourists and steal shopping bags or food right out of their hands!
They were running up and down the railings as we climbed the stairs...(see below)

We visited a Hindu temple and i got a "bindu" put on my forehead (a bindu is the dot you see on the forehead of Hindu women). i was definitely the only blonde on the street with one of those. We visited a mosque later that day so i made sure to wipe it off before entering there! At the mosque we were given these giant, hooded, purple robes to wear in order to obey their dress code. It was funny because the actual Muslim people going to the mosque to pray obviously had their own veils so having to wear the purple ones they give you was like wearing a sign that says "tourist" so we felt kind of ridiculous! It was too bad the guys we went with were both wearing long pants because if they were wearing shorts we would have been able to see them in the non-hooded but equally giantgantic and ridiculous looking purple robes.


It was my roommate Kevin's 24th birthday on sunday so one of the girls from canada bought a giant card we all signed and we wrote "happy birthday" in about 10 different languages on the envelope. Leslie, Alba, and I bought him gifts on behalf of the roommates. He wanted to buy a guitar while in singapore but he hasn't yet so we went to a toy store and bought a little toy plastic guitar that has bright buttons that play songs such as "london bridges" and has an attached mini pink microphone that actually works! (he's always singing in the apartment so we thought it would come in handy.) We also bought him a few other gag gifts so it was a lot of fun.

My classes are all 3 hours and 15 minutes long and i find it impossible to pay attention. I'm in international economics right now...clearly being productive!