We arrive at about 4pm on Thursday afternoon after about a 30 hour trip, counting layovers in Seoul and Chicago. The flight from Seoul to Chicago is one of those interesting ones where we arrive before we leave. (We leave Seoul at noon on Thursday and arrive in Chicago at 10:15 am the same day.) Thanks to the International Dateline, for Tobi and me, Thursday will last for 38 hours. (For several years I've been wanting time to slow down. Maybe I'll get some extra things done on Thursday. I doubt it.
We had a great visit with Glenn Hinton (Tobi's sister, Vicki's husband) this past weekend. He had to come to Malaysia on business and spent several days in Penang before flying here on Friday evening. We had a late dinner at one of our favorite Thai restaurants, the Rain Noodle House. The next morning Glenn and I went upstairs to our friends house, Scott and Karen McKinley, who have been here a couple of months now and live in our same condo tower. Scott and I are both big BYU fans and we have discovered a perfect synergistic partnership. We both have Slingbox, mainly to watch BYU Sports, but I have been extremely disappointed in my internet connection speed here. It makes it nearly impossible to watch a game or anything else. Scott M. has a great connection, but, being from the east coast, he doesn't have The Mountain network, which shows most of the BYU games. Guess who does. So, I take my laptop up to his condo and we use his connection to watch the BYU games. One of these days I will actually see if I can get a connection like he has.
Anyway, so on Saturday morning at 9am, Glenn and I went upstairs to watch BYU beat Utah State. (The game was at 7pm Friday back home.) Tobi thought this was kind of lame of me to take our guest to watch a ball game, but Glenn didn't seem to mind.
After the game we took a walk over to KLCC (Kuala Lumpur City Center) Park and were going to go up to the observation deck in the Petronas Towers (the bridge between the two towers), but alas, they has already sold their allotment of tickets for the day. We did the next best thing and took a taxi to the KL Tower (this is a spire much like the Seattle Space Needle) and went up to the top of it. It's actually a higher view than at Petronas because it's on top of a hill. The view was quite impressive. We found our condo and the Embassy. Off to the west about 10 miles or so we saw this large mountain that seemed to have sheer cliffs several hundred feet high on all sides. Someone said, "That's where the Batu Caves are. This was something that Tobi and I hadn't done yet, so we had our cabbie take us to Batu. The Batu Cave is a Hindu Shrine. There is a large gold-leaf Statue over 100 feet high in front and then you have to negotiate 272 steps (they are numbered) to climb to the opening of the cave itself. The best part of this adventure was the ice cream vendor at the top of the stairs. Then, if you go down some more stairs into the enormous cave and up some more stairs, you come to a large cavern that is open to the sky at the top. It's quite a sight with ferns and vines of all kinds draping the sides of the opening which is a couple hundred feet above you. There are birds flying around and there are monkeys living inside this cavern. Unfortunately, they live off of the scraps of food that the tourists give them.
On the way back we took Glenn to another favorite restaurant, the Lemon Garden, which is a buffet of all kinds of Asian foods. Nobody left there hungry.
Tobi and I had to abandon Glenn for a couple of hours to go help with a District Music Training session. I'm sure they didn't realize that neither of us has much music training ourselves, but Tobi especially did a nice job of instruction.
On Sunday morning, after a home-cooked breakfast of eggs, bacon and toast, we summoned a taxi for Glenn and he was on his way back home. We had a great time and he promises to bring Vicki with him the next time.
I hope to see many of you while we are home, and those we don't see will just have to come and see us. You're all invited any time.
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