Aral Balkan

Some of you may know that I grew up in Malaysia -- Kuala Lumpur, to be precise. The eight amazing years I spent there will always remain in my memories as some of the most precious in my life and I've always wanted to return ever since my family and I left, back in 1989, when I was thirteen. It seemed, however, that -- with puberty, high school, university, work, etc. -- something always got in the way of realizing this dream until this year when I finally decided that we would plan a trip back with Emilie and my parents. Mom and Dad were supposed to fly into Gatwick today (they still haven't seen our new home in Brighton) and we were all supposed to fly out on Tuesday for KL. Unfortunately, as fate would have it, I got a call while in the Netherlands that my parents wouldn't be able to make it after all as my dad had developed a possibly serious condition in his eye -- a blocked vein. My parents are thus going to be flying out to Ankara instead (they live in North Cyprus, where my dad is a professor at one of the universities there) where more tests, and quite possibly a laser operation, can be performed.

In other words, a real bummer.

My initial reaction was, of course, to fly out to Ankara to be by my dad's side but my parents would have none of it. We were instead instructed in no uncertain terms to go and vacation and have fun So Emilie and I are going to be flying out to Malaysia as planned.

I'm planning to visit my old schools (Alice Smith School and Garden International School) while there, as well as our old house and some of my old hangouts and hopefully even hook up with some old friends. And Emilie insists on doing some touristy stuff as well so we'll probably be walking through rainforests and feeding monkeys and the like

We're going to spend a week in KL, followed by a week in Pulau Tioman and then end it off with a few days in Singapore (where I will try desperately not to blow all our savings on cool gadgetry.)

The Back to Malaysia article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.