SS&MonkeyBeach

Good Morning!

It’s Monday morning and I am back at work. Actually this is my fourth week already. Quite a long time event though it doesn’t feel like it at all. This morning it was raining very heavily again after we didn’t have any rain for about a week! Yesterday I spent the afternoon with some other Germans at the pool just chilling, talking and a little bit of swimming of course. Later I went to play my first match of Badminton which is something like the national sport in Malaysia. It was me an Andrej against a Chinese Dad and his son. Actually Andrej is very good and the Chinese evidently just started to play as well and so we won every set. Afterwards I played single against Andrej and got my a… kicked. I was already really tired and the field kept getting bigger and bigger! I am definitely out of shape. So I will go to the gym right away after work today.

Friday night/ evening, since we already went out at 9pm, all the students and other Europeans from Sunnyville and E-Park went to the SS (Slippery Senoritas)
Before the SS

because somebody had managed a deal with the owner to drink cheaper until 10pm. The deal went very well for the owner then of course nobody left after 10pm and we all stayed until the club filled up shortly before 11pm. But it was a great night with a lot of fun. Since we didn’t eat anything before we left the house we also told Jordi (my Spanish Roommate) something about the German culture: “Sieben Bier sind auch ein Schnitzel”! In English this might sound something like: “Seven Beer are also a Steak” so you don’t need anything to eat! But at a certain point we were all very hungry and we went to the Burger Stand in front of Soho (another club)! They make the best Burger here and the most expensive one is 5RM. So I think that’s a deal! The Burgers are not only very fresh and contain a nice amount of ketchup, mayonnaise and a chili sauce but the beef is also surrounded by an egg. I think you can see that on one picture! It is really great!
The next day, for some reason I still don’t know, we all had some hard time to get up before we had the great idea to see the National Park (“Taman Negara” in Malay) here in Penang. We wanted to see the Monkey Beach supposedly the most beautiful beach in Penang but as I already told you the water here is not very clean and so are the beaches. We (Jordi, Flo, Dominik and I) drove the 50min to the entrance of the park and started hiking. I know that it is hot here but this day hiking trough the jungle was really hard. After around 20min all of our shirts were totally wet. I am sorry that I am telling you this right now but it is something that is also very different than being in a “European climate zone”. In this climate you (that’s my experience) are not just sweating at the normal body parts like head or arm pits. Here every single part of your body is sweating! Within a short period of time you are totally wet on your arms as well as on your legs! It’s really different and you just have to accept and cope with it.
Anyway in the middle of the walk we saw a monkey in front of us and we all took our cameras out to take some pictures and all the sudden we were surrounded by the whole family of about 8 or 10 monkeys. They came closer and we definitely were scared of them and went out there very fast. As we arrived on the beach it was sure very nice with palm trees growing right next to it and only a few people there. The sand wasn’t very clean though and some people were riding jet skis and water-ski which made a lot of noise. Anyway I went swimming in the really warm water a little bit but as I told you before it was not very clean.
After we arrived at the car we went to Batu Ferringhi to the Night Market where I bought a lot of DVDs, Shirts, a swimming pants and a hat.
Well that’s it more or less for this weekend. Please fell free to leave some comments in the Blog (there are only 2 up to now) or write me an email.

I wish you all the best for this new week!