This morning we had to be ready by 8:30 to take the bus to the Malaysian Cultural Center. Unfortunately I started to feel a little under the weather this morning, but I tried to make the best of it. As soon as we arrived I could tell it was going to be a great day. The surroundings were a beautiful green, and all the different longhouses made it look like an authentic Malaysian village. Nicole walked us through all seven types of longhouse, consisting of the Bidayuh, Iban, Penan, Orang Ulu, Melanau, Malay, and Chinese longhouses. It was interesting seeing the similarities and differences among the seven longhouses, and the different cultural practices done by each group of people. One thing I loved was trying out the Penan blowpipe in a little target practice session. We payed 1 Ringgit to shoot 3 darts from the blowpipe. Some people hit the target, while others(such as myself) failed horribly at it.
I also loved how carefully the longhouses are built and designed. The uses of wood, bamboo, leaves, and other natural resources was amazing. I have no idea how these groups of people were able to build this awesome longhouses without using ordinary tools.
After walking through the different longhouses, we sat in a small auditorium and watched dancers perform traditional Malaysian dances. These dances were very entertaining, and at the end they even called up people from the audience to go up and do the dance with them. Being the horrible dancer that I am, I stayed in my seat and kept the role of the spectator.
After the cultural center we went back to town and went to another food market for lunch. Satchel and I weren't feeling too great, so we decided to walk over to the mall and had some fish and rice while sitting in the air conditioned mall. After eating a few of us guys stayed there in the food court and had a nice discussion about what we had gathered from the trip so far and what we liked and disliked. We then began walking back to the hotel, in hopes of getting a nap in before the even activities, but we ended up stopping and speaking with the graffiti artists again. This time we mainly spoke to the main artist, Kenji, about his views on singapore and and US. He said that although Singapore is nice, he sees it as almost a jail because of all the cameras around and all the strict rules. As I thought about it, I realized that life really was a lot more relaxed in Kuching compared to Singapore.
For our afternoon activity, guys boarded a Sampan and the girls boarded a different Sampan. After learning the basics of maneuvering the sampan, we began a friendly race between the two boats. At first we had very little motion, but we started to get the hang of it and started off the race well. Unfortunately, the girls were a lot better and completely passed us up and left us in their dust the rest of the time. Being normal american men, we were not very happy about losing to the girls in the race, but we simply just laughed it off.
Nicole then walked us along the other side of the river through an older community that was much less prosperous. It was very humbling to see that right across the river from our nice hotel, there were people living in run down homes.
We then finished off at a small food court, where Nicole bought us several different typical dishes to taste and it was so much that it pretty much ended up being our whole dinner. The food was amazing, but I felt bad leaving so much since she paid for it. Unless Dr. Perumal paid? I'm not so sure..
After eating, we took a sampan(for 50cents Ringgit which is less than a quarter in US currency) back across the river and walked around a little before returning to the hotel. Since I wasn't feeling too great this morning, I'm going to bed early tonight so that I'll feel better by tomorrow.
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