Kuala Lumpur & Penang

by | Sunday, May 11, 2008

I love Malaysia. I love its greenery, its up and down hilly landscape, the colors and designs of the houses, and yes the food.

Malaysians are food crazy. There are food stalls everywhere and the range and variety of food available is just amazing. My first night here Rajendran and his wife took me to a Hindu south Indian restaurant where food is served, traditional Indian style, on plantain leaves. The food was simple but tasty.

I spent the next half-day with Kurnia who drove me around KL and showed me the sights. We went for brunch to a little street-side restaurant and for 10 Ringat (which comes to around 3 dollars) we had a huge and tasty meal (and I mean huge). We also visited the Batu Caves in Kuala Lumpur, an immense Hindu temple situated in cavernous limestone caves. The huge golden statue of Murugan in the front draws people in but the caves are what impressed me the most. You reach the cave-temples by climbing a steep staircase (over 250 steps) and I was sweating profusely by the time we reached the top. But it was worth it. I hope some of the photographs I have taken do justice to this impressive natural geographical structure. Finally she dropped me off at the airport for my flight to Penang.

After a few hours in KL airport spent catching up on email and receiving “offensive and tasteless” error messages from my ISP, I arrived at Penang. Penang is the second largest city in Malaysia and is situated on a little island. This is location of the University Sains Malaysia, the second oldest university in Malaysia, where I will be presenting on Monday. I was received at the airport by Dr. Binti Rozinah Jamaludin, the person most responsible for making this entire trip happen, and it was great to meet with her finally (after more than an year of email interaction – my first email from her is dated February 2007!).

After checking into my hotel Dr. Rozinah took me on a drive around Penang – to a spot known as the end of the world. The drive is stunning, a series of hair-pin bends along a mountain-side, hanging over the edge of the ocean. I saw some interesting restaurants on the way (one called “End of the world cafe” and another was just called “The Tsunami”). We finally had dinner at some street stalls right near the hotel I am living in.

Today (Sunday) was a relatively slow day. I spent the morning (and evening) walking and taking photographs around the hotel and most of the day working on my talk. I have a better sense of the audience now, after talking with Dr. Rozinah, and am pulling together ideas from across a range of different presentations. I see a long night ahead of me, but again given my jet-lag, that’s not as bad as it sounds. Hopefully it will go well.

To seem all the photographs I have taken so far you can go here (on this website) or here (on flickr).

Topics related to this post: Fun | News | Personal | Photography | Travel

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Rethinking Creativity, Race, Culture & Education

Rethinking Creativity, Race, Culture & Education

Episode 115 (dated July 30, 2022) of the Silver Lining for Learning webinar series focused on critiquing existing research on creativity - which for the most part has focused on the psychological and cognitive aspects of creativity. The guests on the show (Lori Patton...

Orissa Folklore

Just got an email from a fellow Mishra (no relationship, at least I don't know of any), Dr. Mahendra Mishra who works as the state tribal education coordinator in my home state of Orissa as a part of it's Primary Education Program (more at www.opepa.in). Mahendra He...

Dabbling to see: A rant

My friend and colleague Leigh Wolf forwarded me this article on Edward Tufte: The Many Faces (And Sculptures) Of Edward Tufte. I have been a fan of information design guru Edward Tufte's work for years (decades?). I love his emphasis on clarity and simplicity in...

What we get wrong about 21st century learning

What we get wrong about 21st century learning

Click on diagram to download a hi-res version Back in 2013 we proposed a framework for 21st century learning based on a synthesis of a range of reports, books, and articles (Kereluik, Mishra, Fahnoe & Terry, 2013 & diagram above). That article...

The process of design: A quote

The process of design: A quote

I have been a huge fan of Bill Atkinson, creator of MacPaint, one of the key players in developing the GUI for the original Macintosh including coming up with things as the double-click, the menu bar, marquee selection and lots of interface ideas we...

Arts, wellness & creativity: New article

Arts, wellness & creativity: New article

Dr. Paula Thomson and Dr. Vicki Jaque are professors at California State University, Northridge, where they co-direct the exercise and psychophysiology laboratory. They each have their own individual research interests but together they work on researching connections...

SITE 2008: A preview

Matt and I are at the SITE conference next week. He has blogged about it here... so I need to do my bit. We have a busy schedule at Las Vegas, which means less time for all the fun stuff. The big one is the Keynote by Matt and myself (more details below). Here is a...

Student engagement, a response to @ewilliams65

In a couple of previous blog post (Student engagement in school, the tale of 2 graphs and Understanding student engagement) I wrote about  the findings of a recent Gallup Poll on student engagement. The first post was concerned with how the data were represented and...

1 Comment

  1. Ben

    Hi, nice post 🙂

    Penang is really a wonderful place to visit in Malaysia. I visited once and feel like visiting again 🙂

    I compiled Penang Travel Guide recently. Please visit and have some comments .. Hopefully I will visit Penang soon 🙂

    cheers Ö

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Ben Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *