Island Hopping and Global Village

I came back to KL from Langkawi yesterday and met with my friend Alina from Romania, who is on an AIESEC internship in Johor Bahru in the south of Malaysia right now. She works for a travel agency called myoutdoor.com and part of her job is to travel around Malaysia and write articles about the best places. Sounds great, right? I actually applied for that same internship about a year and a half ago but they never even replied to me. The world is such a tiny place... Anyway, Alina and many other AIESECers came to KL to visit the Global Village at the AIESEC International Congress 2009 that just started today. But first a few pictures from my last day in Langkawi:

I went on a popular tour called "island hopping" where they take you to three different islands around Langkawi. The first one is Pulau (island) Dayang Bunting (pregnant maiden). With a little imagination you can actually see the pregnant maiden lying there on her back.

There is a freshwater lake on the island that is good for swimming.

The island was inhabited by a large number of monkeys. At the dock there were large signs that said you should not take plastic bags on the island and soon later a few chinese tourists discovered why. They had a plastic bag and where suddenly attacked by at least 10 monkeys that tried to snatch the bag from them, pretty funny to watch. At the next island they drove the boat into a mangrove bay and threw out some fish to attract the local eagles to show up. The eagles were huge and it was pretty impressive to see them dive down into the water right next to the boat but still I dont really approve of this bc the eagles probably dont even know how to hunt properly anymore bc of all the tourist boats coming there all day long throwing out fish...

The final island (Pulau Beras Basah) we visited had a really beautiful beach again.

So yesterday I flew back to KL and today I met up with around 20 people from AIESEC Kuala Lumpur and trainees who are in the city to go to the venue of the International Congress (IC). This is the biggest conference AIESEC has worldwide, where all country board members from the world come together for almost two weeks. Unfortunately I did not make it as a delegate to the conference but the event global village is open to the public anyway so there was no way I was going to miss that.

The very posh venue of the IC. The "Palace of the golden Horses" is located pretty far outside the actual city in a kind of rundown area but the hotel itself is really awesome.

So this was the global village. There the delegation from every country (AIESEC has 107 member countries right now) brings typical foods, pictures, information, clothes and whatever from their homecountries and represents their culture at their boot. You can just walk around and talk to the people and try everything out. It was just really bad timing that today Ramadan started and so a good portion of the people there was not allowed to try any of the food. I was told today that as a Malaysian Muslim you can even go to jail when you get caught eating during the day in Ramadan... crazy! Still global village was super awesome and really made me wish I could attend the whole conference :/

The delegation from AIESEC in Indonesia performing a traditional Indonesian welcome
dance. I talked to them later at their booth and they are having a national conference in in Java in October. If I can find the time I might try to go there as a trainer/facilitator. I also talked to some people from Singapore and Hong Kong about their conferences. Hope I can make it to one or two of those to meet a few locals.

And some more random pictures:

I was craving some snack in Langkawi so I bought a pack of these crackers. It was only at home when I saw that they had tiny fish baked into them... ugh!

Selamat Datang = welcome... somebody was misled by Google translator here...

I will be staying in KL until Wednesday, but I might go to Melaka for a daytrip on Monday or so. On Wednesday I will then fly to Bali and finally meet up with the other guys. Cant wait!