kuala selangor...

Time is moving so quickly, it doesn't seem like very long at all since i was last sitting here at this computer checking my emails before we headed off for the weekend... but now i'm back almost in the blink of an eye... had a really great weekend though... this is what we did:

We drove to Kuala Selangor (i think there were 20 of us in total) shortly after lunch time on saturday, and after a night of little sleep on friday (my own fault i stayed up late playing a game with Chuen Hoe) I was fully expecting to sleep in the car like I usually do, and I was tired, but I was also fascinated by the scenery so I strived to stay awake and watch as we drove past forests of palm trees (specially planted to obtain palm oil) and rubber trees... also a fair few sizeable mosques and temples...

We arrived at a quite little town past Kuala Selangor where we were to be staying and got out of the cars... but no-one seemed to know what we were meant to be doing... so we just kind of wandered round a bit, some people disappeared to get bags of cendol (like green jelly worms, served with beans in an ice cold brown sugary drink - very refreshing) while todd and i had a look in a truely awful souvenir shop... after this little stop came to nothing we got back into the cars and drove to our appartment (a deceptive place, on the outside it didn't look like it would house us for the night, however on the inside it was more than adequate with five bedrooms and two bathrooms, it was a little crowded but we got by fine). We played a couple of games to ensure that everyone was aquainted with each other (the kind of organised fun that makes me cringe... I realised pretty early that I had to swallow my pride and join in and we had a good laugh!)

We had tea in a seafood restaurant (Kuala Selangor has a huge river running through it so there is seafood aplenty :-)) and split our group into two tables... I sat next to a guy called Kai Yit who we met in the first week and comes to english class, he's a really nice guy and I had a great time chatting to him while we ate... we had all manner of different seafood... including something called bamboo clams (look a lot like small sticks of bamboo, but with little worm things living inside - yummy!)... after this we got lost driving around and then made it to the firefly park...

This was an experience to be savoured, we split into groups of three and four, clothed ourselves in life jackets and got into little canoes... and a guy standing at the back rowed us up and down the river, which in itself was superb, the river lit only by the moonlight stretched far into the distance and was lined with silhoutted palm trees... to add to the experience the trees on the river banks were lit up by the glittering of thousands of fireflies flashing their lights to attract mates... altogether quite a romantic experience... (just fitting for me and todd and big guy to share!!)

The next day - today - we went drove about some paddy fields (fairly boring as we missed the harvest so they were essentially just empty fields) and stopped at a mango orchard and asked the man tending it to sell us some mangos, which he did... they weren't quite ripe so were pretty hard and also quite sour... but were about 3 times bigger than any other mango i'd seen before...



We then headed to another seafood restaurant, this time a place on stilts over the edge of the river, where we could watch boats sail by and there was a cool breeze making for a very pleasant lunch... a similar experience to the night before... we sat round a table and they brought out a plate of rice each and then filled the centre of the table with aquatic delacacies... which everyone just kind of piled in on, and there was enough for us to eat our fill... new foods from the meal today: little shell fish - not sure what they were - a bit like muscles, and crabs (i've had crab before but not this fresh and not crab accompanied by a set of hammers and nut crackers to get into them - very messy, in fact i managed to make a claw explode all over my shorts!)... Just after we finished the people at the table next to us ordered a big plate of snails to shell (sea snails) and a man noticed todd and I looking on with a mixture of curiosity and disgust.. he reacted to this by pulling a snail out of its shell (with a little stick) and offering it to us, we thanked him discussed who was actually going to eat it before agreeing to split it and both give it a try... intially it tasted quite sweet and had a kind of chewy texture, but once you got through to the middle there was a taste which wasn't that pleasant and remained for some time... we survived the ordeal but I'm not sure that I'll be ordering snails again in a hurry!

We got back in our cars and I once again kept myself awake so that I wouldn't miss anything on the ride home

I think I'm getting a cold, please pray that it'll leave me alone fairly quickly as I'm really having a good time and don't want that to spoil it...