Santa Hat

Monday 13th December 2010

MP3 track of the day: Do they know it's Christmas – Band Aid

Weather: Rain midday but brightening up towards the evening

I got up even later today than yesterday. Looking at the clouds it looked like rain was on it's way. The girls needed to do some shopping and so we all headed to the local shopping center; the two German girls, a German bloke and I. Once there the two girls did their stuff and I went with the bloke to find a Santa hat, as it's Christmas. We went to this one shop selling cheap-looking Santa hats for 60p and we purchased one.

I was a little worried wearing a Santa hat in a manly Muslim country however it was he best 60p I've ever spent. As we walked around we saw people smiling, laughing and we even got quite a few merry Christmas exchanges. One Indian bloke came up to the both of us, with a big smile on his face, shook our hands and said Merry Christmas … that alone was worth the cost and it had been my best experience, with the Malayan people, so far. It seems the Santa bit of Christmas breaks boundaries of culture, country and religion … it seems to bring people together and everyone we spoke to was a little happier once we had exchanged comments.

It was still raining when we left the shopping center and so we grabbed some lunch; we headed back to the hostel to watch a film called 'Brothers' (set around the Afgan war; its good) and we just chilled waiting for the rain to stop.

The rain stopped around 5:30pm and so we headed out to this chocolate shop in George Town where they make Malayan chocolate. I was pretty excited about this as it would help me keep my 'world of chocolate' trip alive. The chocolate shop was only a five minute walk away from the hostel and so we were soon given a group number and went on a tour. This had to be the quickest tour known to man; there were six rooms with different types of chocolate in each and we had roughly 0.045 seconds in each room where we got to taste a very small chocolate sample before being escorted to the shop where the staff were encouraging us to purchase something. Unusually we found some boxes of chocolates that looked quite nice, were quite expensive and were to all of our tastes. We had just about decided to spend eleven ringgit each when an attendant said to us not to buy the chocolates we had chosen; she was so adiment that I thought she might not even allow us to purchase them. We therefore opted for a cheap box of chocolates that we shared between us. The chocolates weren't actually that good compared to Belgium, UK, Japan and New Zealand and so it was quite a disappointment.

We had an hour and a half to kill before we had decided to head out for tea; we walked around town for a while, checking out some of the temples and the waterfront, again, before heading back to the hostel to meet up with others before heading out for tea.

We found a nice place to eat where I had some spring rolls, fried pork and a noodle soup … which was so large that I felt really full after wards. However we didn't stop there; we then headed to another restaurant to have a banana rotai (banana pancake to you and me) which is famous around this part of the world … it was okay, however the hot mango juice (which I certainly didn't order hot) was horrible.

I was extremely full by now, however as we decided to watch another film back at the hostle before hitting the sack (Shrek four … with dodgy English subtitles) I decided to purchased some chocolate and a coke. It's been a nice, relaxing day today … not sure what tomorrow will bring.

Toodle Pip!