Hello again!! It has been a long, but very inspiring and blessed time since our last blog. We have been in Malaysia visiting friends, but last week was Chinese New Year, so we packed enough clothes for 5 days of traveling to Melaka and Penang and have not returned yet to our friends (going on 11 days now). We will try to sum up some of the great experiences and blessings from our time of traveling. If you are wondering, we have indeed washed our clothes during this time or we would be super smelly (the weather is super hot).

So we got up early on Monday to make our travel to Melaka with our friend Sherry Tan to find out that it would be several hours before we would leave. Her family is amazing--some of the friendliest people. We rode in one of the two cars through the holiday traffic and arrived at a house full of people (her relatives on her mothers side). Usually, we feel like the outsiders as everyone speaks Chinese or another language, but we were happy to find everyone speaks very fluent English and that they love to travel (more than we do). We learned a lot about her whole family, through pictures stories, talking and lots of laughs.

Some things we learned about Chinese New Year: they have a reunion dinner where the family gets together the night before the new year, with lots of symbolic foods (long noodles for prosperity), a salad that everyone stirs together and sends blessings (yee sang), prawns, and so many others.People put out dozens of kinds of snacks for their family and friends to visit them throughout the 15 day holiday. The price of all things goes up, but you get to try all kinds of specialty foods. We enjoyed all kinds of special things in Melaka. It is the key to the history of Malaysia. It dates back to the Portuguese in the 1600's, then the Dutch who took over later and the British. So there are all kinds of famous churches, one devoted to St. Francis Xavier who was the initial M to Malaysia and also to some parts of Japan. Also a variety of houses and food, the long houses from the Dutch (taxes based upon the length of the front, so small front and long building, british schools and Portuguese settlements of fishermen.

We learned a lot about the Chinese culture from our special guide, Sherry's uncle: Uncle Michael who is a historian in the church and city. His family moved to East Malaysia several hundred years ago from China to escape persecution and most of the Chinese inter-married with locals to make Nyonya (mixed culture). They have retained most of their culture but lost the language mostly. I think I could write pages about my love for the variety of foods here in Malaysia...I love it. The weather has stuck to tradition, no rain for Chinese New Year, so that was nice. We were able to enjoy days of traveling and will write later about our time in Penang, a historical and beautiful island in the NW of Malaysia.

We have a few more days here in Malaysia before heading to Indonesia and then to visit students in China before returning for schools start on the 2nd of March. What a great long break, but we miss our students and Patty our puppy.