Perhentian Islands, Malaysia

A few weeks ago was Cheusok. Cheusok is very similar to Thanksgiving, but no turkey or pie. And as you know, we don't participate in holidays if there's no pie.

We traveled to Malaysia! After talking with Jeff about Cheusok during the first month of school, we decided we'd all go somewhere together. Jim and I wanted to go to Bali, Jeff and Anna wanted to go someplace they hadn't been before. The problems we have! Jeff found cheap flights, and that was enough to persuade us.

As we were leaving for the airport, Jeff casually said, "nothing could possibly go wrong on this trip". Jim and I scolded him for jinxing/ruining everything. (Spoiler alert-the trip was great anyway). To get to our resort we needed to take a 6 hour flight from Seoul to Kualal Lumpur, Malaysia, then a short 45 minute flight to a coastal town, then take the ferry to the island the following morning. I hate trips like this, but this one was surprisingly painless.

As we ate dinner in the airport (at Wendy's!), Jeff was walking around with his baby and said he ran into the Jenkins, a family who worked at KIS last year who now live in China and that they were on their way to the same island. We all told Jeff he was full of it (he is almost always full of it).

We spent our first night in Kota Bharu. It's a small coastal town. We got food at a market in the morning. Breakfast was chicken and rice with coffee and then we found the good stuff: donuts. I can't remember the name but $1 worth was a huge bag with fried dough with a peach jam in it. The vacation eating had begun!

We took a taxi to the pier and got on our boat-and among the 10 people on the boat other than us, there were the Jenkins. It was crazy and so perfect. They have 3 kids and our kids already all know each other and played together the whole week. It couldn't have been better.

When we got to the resort, we took off our shoes and didn't put them on again until we left. We stayed at the Tuna Bay resort and the coral in front of the resort was amazing. We got snorkel masks and spent the rest of the week exploring the ocean. We saw parrot fish, eels (yikes!), and octopus (it inked when Jim swam closer to it, how embarrassing), and we swam with turtles. We relaxed, we napped, we swam, we ate. Every day. It was actually the perfect vacation. Here's a video summary:

A video week in review

We've been working on a video project all week. Many people have asked me if it was inspired by Adam Hobbs; it was not. I wouldn't dream of pretending that this is a documentary, because it's not. It's a video mashup. I took the idea from a teacher at KIS who took the idea from this TED talk. All great things start with a TED talk, isn't that what they say? The TED talk was from a guy who put together a video made up of 1 second video clips of every day for a year. We can't make that kind of commitment to anything without a hefty signing bonus, so we did 2 second clips throughout each day for one week.

As I was doing this, I have to admit, it felt very narcissistic. So let me tell you this-it is a little narcissistic on the surface. And I am posting it to the blog which makes me feel even more narcissistic, but in a way, it's more for me than for you. Our blog serves a few purposes: it started out as a way for friends and family to keep up with us and see what we're doing while living far away (finally-the name of the blog has been revealed to you!) but it has really become a kind of modern day scrapbook for me.

With all this in mind, I have a few disclaimers about the video:
1. Your life looks AWESOME when you set it to music
2. These are not necessarily highlights, they are just things that happened during the week, but don't think everything is perfect-believe me the kids complain and cry as much (more than?) kids in any other family; but I don't need to watch that any more than I already do in real life.
3. I love this video. I want to do one for every week for the rest of my life.
4. You should do this in your own life.
5. Jim chose the music (the perfect music)