The Adventures of Trip and Kim: Monkeys!

Wow, it has been awhile since we last wrote and there is so much to catch up on! First of all, I started work on Tuesday, Sept. 15. I am working as an assistant to Oma, the Senior Vice President of Employer Relations at INTI (the school Trip is working at). It has been pretty fun so far, mostly because I get to work with Trip. It definitely is keeping me busy too. I am helping Oma get the new Master's program up and running as well as helping him with some other projects. So far, I spend my time keeping Oma organized and making sure his secretary schedules meetings, etc. Trip says I'm like Pepper Potts in Iron Man. (Haha, it's kind of true!) I spend three days of the week at the campus Trip works at and two days of the week in the Corporate Offices, which is where Dad works. Even though we are in different offices I still see Trip more now than before I started working and now I have a better idea of what the program is when he talks about it.

So, that is the reason it has taken me a bit to write this. This last week was nice because we had Monday and Tuesday off for Hari Raya, which is the Muslim celebration of the end of Ramadan (the fasting period). We didn't really find out about the four day weekend very far in advance so we didn't leave Kuala Lumpur to travel like most people did. However, we did go up to Batu Caves, which is a short drive from where we are. Batu Caves is actually a temple (Hindu, I think) that is built in some caves in the middle of a mountain. You have to climb up 273 stairs, which wasn't as bad as I thought it might be, though I did feel it later. I thought it was funny that they painted the numbers on the stairs so you can see just how far you still have to go. I tried to take some pictures, but the lighting was a little tricky for my point and shoot camera. I really need to get a better camera. Anyway, here are some pictures of the caves...

This is the statue at the bottom of the stairs.

The 273 stairs we were about to climb.

Here Trip is halfway up the stairs.

This is the actual cave at the top.

Here is one of the temples. They are so ornate.

Of course the fact that there were a zillion monkeys at the top was totally worth it, especially for Trip!

So, those are just some of the pictures from Batu Caves. We have some videos of the monkeys too, but they were taking too long to upload. I think the best part of the whole trip was when one monkey totally charged a kid and grabbed a sandwich straight out of his hands! It was so funny.

On Tuesday we went to the Aquarium which was actually pretty cool. They had a really good underwater tunnel with HUGE sharks, stingrays, eels, and turtles. It was pretty active too so they were all swimming right next to you. We tried to get some pictures, but the lighting wasn't very good and we weren't allowed to use a flash so they are all blurry since the fish were moving. Here is a somewhat decent one of a shark that was right over our heads and was on the larger side.