Malaysia Recap (email)

11 total days in Malaysia is hardly enough time to say that you have seen the country. It is definitely too short of a time to attempt to understand the people and the culture. I feel like I have to go back, I should spend more time there, eat more food there, and see more of the diverse landscape, really 11 days is nothing in a country with two very different environments (the peninsula and the island).
What I saw in my 11 days in Malaysia is something that I have yet to experience and come across in my travels. To me it was a large cluster of cultural confusion, it was a diverse country, but diverse only because it contained such large numbers of four different countries and cultures; Indian, Chinese, Thai, and Malay. What I couldn’t figure out the whole time I was there though, is who and what is “Malaysian,” I had a difficult time distinguishing between someone or some cultural things that were truly Malay and those people and things that were just a muddled mix of all the neighboring countries.
I couldn’t really tell what was “Malay” and what was fusion. I guess that is what Malaysia is, a beautiful mix of people and culture, living together happily, from the food to religion, it was all mixed together. If you asked me to describe Malaysia (in the 11 days I was there) I would say, it’s a muddled intermingling of Asia. I liked it, but it confused me, when seeking out “real” Malaysia I felt like I kept coming up empty handed, but perhaps what I saw, what I tasted, what I experienced, and lived amongst, for those 11 short days was in fact what I was looking for the whole time. Maybe that mix, that fusion, the people, the flavors, and the culture it creates is “real” Malaysia. I’ll have to go back to and investigate more.