Friday Night in Kuching

Today, we flew from Johor Bahru to Kuching. Kuching is the capital city of Sarawak and is located in the island of Borneo. We landed at about 3:00 PM and the first thing I noticed about Kuching was that it was a lot cleaner than Johor Bahru, which I definitely appreciated. Since the Sabbath is tomorrow we didn't have much going on in the itinerary, so we had a lot of free time to explore the city. I didn't really get the opportunity to go walking around on my own in the other two cities we were in, so I took advantage when we had the opportunity to go walking around. We had about an hour before we had to meet back at the hotel for dinner, which isn't too much time. My friends and I decided to just walk down a couple streets to get a feel for the city. We walked down and something that stood out to me was how nice all the locals were. We asked them questions about their city and they were more than happy to help us out. I got a great first impression of the city and it's people.

 

While we were on our way back to the hotel one of the funniest things happened to us. A large group of Indonesian tourists walked past us and started to giggle. I turned around and noticed one of them walking towards us trying to build up the courage to ask me something. She asked me if they could take a picture with us! I don't know if they asked because we were American or if it was because my friend Mark is super tall. But either way, it made me feel pretty famous. We talked to them for a little bit and took some more pictures before making it back to the hotel. 

Our whole group met in the lobby of the hotel and then we walked to where we were going to have dinner. It was an Indian restaurant, but this one was a North Indian restaurant so we could actually use utensils. The food here was great, they had the best naan I've ever had. Along with some mutton, fish marsala, and chicken marsala. They also had this thing called cheesy naan that blew everybody's minds. After dinner some of the girls in our class wanted to do some laundry at the laundromat and asked me and Mark to come with them. We all went and did laundry for about an hour. This was the first time I have ever been to a laundromat and honestly one of the first times that I even did laundry on my own. It was definitely a really cool experience for me. Afterwards we walked down what they call the River. It's basically a night market that's right by the waterfront and it looked awesome during the night. We started the Riverside by our hotel and walked all the way down until it stopped. At the end there were so many people congregated there and most of them were playing Pokemon GO. But the ones that weren't were playing with glow in the dark toys. We stayed there for a while before heading back to the hotel at around 10:00 PM. 

Day one in Kuching was a success in my book, I can't wait for three more days of this amazing city! 

Sal Puma