JWAS in KL

J. WAS in KL (Kuala Lumpur) A parking garage--AWAS means 'careful' in Malaysian. Yes, they use English characters, unlike Cambodia and Thailand.

Returning 'home' from Singapore, I had a stopover in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I did much strolling and wandering around the city streets. I also saw quite a lot of the city from above. I ascended each of the two towers (below), one each day, from where I could observe all 'round the entire city. I took the monorail, also raised above the street, and saw more of the city from yet another angle.


Petronas Twin Towers, the tallest twin towers in the world, and the second tallest architectural structure in the world.


Petronas Tower 1, from the skybridge at level 42


KL Tower (a communications tower)


square on new year's eve (although NOT times square, interestingly, I did stroll past a building called 'times square'), from where i wrote a couple postcards and did some sketching. the KL Tower is in the background (right) and the Petronas Twin Towers are farther away. The clock tower of the parliament building (formerly British) is in the foreground.


on the train back to the airport through the land of mosques and oil palms

Toul Sleng

Minutes away from my shophouse, I discovered Toul Sleng, a former high school taken over by the Khmer Rouge 3 decades ago. Then, it was a used as a place for prisoner torchure and interrogation. Now, it is an unsettling museum in the heart of town, surrounded my homes and apartment buildings just as it was then. It is easy to overlook and blends in with its surroundings. Then, it wouldn't have been so easy. Cries of terror, pain, and sorrow would have been easily heard by the adjoining buildings. Yet even then, it was ignored. Below are a few of the thousand pictures of those who had to go through Toul Sleng. Their end is certain--a mere 7 humans escaped alive from Toul Sleng to tell the story.





The Killing Fields are slightly farther away outside of town. We visited one of over 20,000 discovered mass graves where mostly 12- to 15-year-olds in Khmer Rouge uniform horrificly slaughtered over half of Cambodia's population. Especially harrowing is the way in which they did the killing--bullets were too expensive to use; gas was not thought of. It is beyond comparison to the Holocaust, besides the fact that it was people killing their own people.


unearthed bones are scattered about. some have been collected in small piles along with bits of tattered clothing and even teeth. more bones and clothes lay just above the surface of the walkways of dirt--the earth is full of her people's bones.

like a drink of cool water

Angkor Wat





Mom, Dad, Chris Clouzet, Tim Mathews, and the rest of the mission group from Collegedale all came to see ME over the Christmas holiday. Below is a brief summary and (probably more interesting) pictures.


orphan child, siem reap

We spent about 7 days working at the orphanage in Siem Reap. There was a dental clinic and a kids program. But I mostly worked on construction of the new dormitory laying brick with my brick-laying veteran father. We also visited the temples for two days (top). We took a boat from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh on the Ton Le Sap River/Lake. We spent two short days in Phnom Penh eating, shopping, checking out Toung Sleng and the Killing Fields, and restocking my apartment (with food from the motherland,--thank you all). Then I flew alone to Singapore via Bangkok, Thailand. The group followed and we arrived about the same time on Thursday afternoon. We stayed in Singapore almost on the Equator till Saturday night when Collegedale flew back to Tennessee via Frankfurt and New York City. In Singapore, we walked around the modern city, shopped, visited Little India and Chinatown, and the boys and I went to the movie 'Eragon'. On Sabbath we took the skytram to Sentosa Island and went to the beach where we got sunburned in just two cloudy hours (hellooo, the equator is hot I guess).






at the temples (t. mathews)

After we said goodbye Saturday night, I walked back to the hotel with Rhonda (one of the group going on to Hong Kong) then Jonathan, a former volunteer at CAS (Cambodia Adventist School) picked me up and I stayed at his house that night (as Singapore is rather pricy). In the morning, Jonathan drove me to the airport in Jahor Bahru (over the border/water into Malaysia) where I flew to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. My connecting flight to Phnom Penh was there but I stayed for about a day. I wandered around the city of Mosques and Muslims to the KL Tower, a tall communications tower and went to the top. I wandered some more to a square I had seen from the tower and wrote and sketched the interesting buildings. It would have been a nice spot to see the fireworks that night but I became weary of sitting and walked back to my hotel.


chris in the light and shadows of bayon temple (t. mathews)

There, I sat and finally fell asleep thinking I would rise before 12. I didn't. The next day, January 1, 2007, I walked to the Petronas Twin Towers, the tallest twin towers and the 2nd tallest building in the world. I also went up this piece of architecture to the skybridge that connects them. After more aimless strolling, I took the monorail to KL Sentral where I took a train to the airport, then a bus to my terminal and a plane to Phnom Penh.


a temple at dusk

My local family (Tim, Fay, Michelle, and Lindsay) was there to pick me up and we had ice-cream at the airport Dairy Queen. We had supper together that night and talked about our different trips. Now it's exciting school again.







It was so refreshing to see my parents and my good friends Chris and Tim. It was awesome actually. I had been looking forward to it for months! It was great to laugh heartily again and just be with people who truly know me and understand me and love me. (Yet suprisingly and unfortunately, we realized we have few good pics of us together. Nevertheless, we had a blast.)


The sun and the moon. What?