Week one

Friday
After the two and a half hour drive to London, I arrived at Heathrow. I found a group of fellow project trustees almost as soon as I arrived, some people had flown in from various locations throughout Britain and had already been there for hours. Check in and security all went pretty smoothly and before i knew it I was boarding the plane.
Now with a name like Etihad Airways I already had some preconceptions in my head about the quality of my first 7 hour stretch of the journey, I imagined  crappy felt seats and stale air conditioning. I was pleasantly surprised then, to find that the whole plane was kitted out with individual televisions filled to the brim with current blockbuster films. 7 hours flew by with the help of 'Oblivion', 'IronMan 3', 'G.I Joe 2', X-Men 3' and two episodes of family guy. Although I'm fairly confident that this contributed heavily to my jet lag. we arrived in Abu Dhabi at 11:00 am local time, there was quite a lot of options for stuff to do at the airport but we all looked like the walking dead, so we headed straight to our gate and just chilled there. It was there that I made friends with a solid gold camel who's name I forget, so we'll just call him Duncan.

Duncan was a true friend for a full five minutes

We then boarded our second Etihad flight, which involved walking about 17 steps in the hot desert 48 degrees, which was fun....sort of. The next leg of the journey took just under 8 hours, and it was on this flight that I tried to catch up on my sleep, with a short interval where i forced myself to consume some plane food, if food is the right word for it, personally I'm not sure.
we landed in KL at about 23:00 and after sailing through security, and after a navigating a slight hitch at customs, I had arrived at my destination. we were taken to our hotel by bus, and then taken straight out again by Adam an Noriani for our firs taste of Malay Cuisine.
We spent the next few days sorting out mobile phones, getting over jet lag and having a nice day trip to Malacca.
On Monday we drove into the center of KL for the night, where we went shopping, and in the evening went to see the Petronas Towers. I had a glass of dragon fruit juice which was nice, but turns your we a worrying shade of red.
The nxt day we walked across the street to the Mara center, but even that short walk was not without incident. A parade of 4000+ soldiers doing a rehearsal march for the Independence day parade saw us and stared cheering at us, it was surreal to have thousands of the Malaysian army cheering for a bunch of pasty British kids while they were celebrating their Independence from Britain. at MARA we met up with Fahmy, our representative from our school and had a discussion about our placement. Once we were finished it was straight onto the bus for a 10 hour drive up to Terengganu.

Accommodation in Seramban

Dragon fruit juice

Me and Dale try out Baju Kurungs. swag

Petronas Towers

 


Wednesday was our first day at Kota Putra, our accommodation is at the old sick bay, there is a fain smell of something in the air that suggests it was the quarantine zone, but its fine, its spacious and well lit. the on problem is the air conditioning, or rather the total lack of. there are fans, but all they really do is take the really hot, humid air, and blast it at you. the shower started out as just a pipe sticking out of the wall, but I managed to accidentally 'improve it', which basically means that instead of a pipe in a wall that spits water at you, we now have a hole in the wall that spits on you. Our bathroom (even though it doesn't have a bath i think its still technically a bathroom) now looks like a scene from Fawlty towers.


We spent the rest of the week just learning our way around the school and the staff, the school is massive it houses 876 permanent students, who we were forced to speak in front of in an assembly without any warning, fun. we have been treated to plenty of free food and drinks though so that is always a plus.

On Friday, Me, Dan and Dale got a Taxi up to Callum and James in Pasir Tumboh, we stayed there for the holiday weekend for Independence day, and visited Kota Bahru on Saturday. we went shopping for Batik shirts and bought some sarongs (man-skirts) and then we were given free tickets to go to a Kelantan football match, which was great fun.

currently back to work and Kota Putra now, but we're looking at a trip to the Perhentians this weekend so should be good.