Sunday, November 29, 2015

Long Road To Bali

We woke up at 5am and didn't get to our hotel in Bali until 10pm.  We've had longer travel days before, but this has felt like the longest day EVER, mostly because the airport in Malaysia was the WORST and every line that could take longer, did!  Let's backtrack.

Our taxi driver forgot to pick us up this morning, so we waited outside our apartment building for 15 minutes until he came for us.  At this point I'm nervous because we're running late and of course the stupid security decided to pick today to search Aaron's entire backpack, only to find an external hard drive with a bunch of movies on it.  Ohhhhh!  You really got us now!  Way to go!  

After a painless hour and a half flight, we were in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  The airport is super fancy with a giant mall inside and tons of food options.  We have 6 hours until our next flight and they won't let us check in until 3 hours before, so we sat and waited.  Of course, Aaron had to try McDonald's and it was a huge, weirdly decorated McDonald's:
Weird stuff on the menu:

Malaysian money:

When it was 3 hours before our flight, we got in a stupid long line and waited a stupidly long time.  This is how infuriating it was: There was one guy servicing the entire line and it was like his first day or something, so each person was taking a lifetime.  Then another lady finally opens her lane and pulls all the people from the BACK OF THE LINE and services them.  Does that make any sense???!!?  We're in the middle going "WTF LADY?!"  Why wouldn't you pull the next customer?  What would possess you to pull people who had just gotten in the line versus people who have been waiting for an hour?!  It was infuriating.  Then to top it all off, they were constantly calling out flights that were fast approaching and pulling all those people to service first because otherwise they were going to miss their flight.  That's how slow this line was.  Unbelievable.  
We finally got through that mess and rushed to Immigration, which took another crazy long time.  What's with this airport??  Everything's so unorganized and slow!
After Immigration, we're starting to worry, so I cut the line at security and informed them of our departure time and they let us through.  We didn't have to take our liquids out, our electronics or our shoes off, like everyone else was.  Hmm, that was way too easy.
We literally ran about a mile to our gate and were covered in sweat when we got there, but we made it on our flight.  Malaysia, goodbye and good riddens!  
Not so fast: we sat on the tarmac for about 40 minutes waiting for our turn to take off and landed in Bali an hour late.  Not cool!
Thankfully Bali's got their shit together and we were in and out of there in less than half an hour (which is awesome of you think about it: we went through the visa line, Immigration, baggage claim, currency exchange and taxi line).  Way to go, Bali!

We checked into Eden Hotel in Kuta (near the mall) and it's beautiful:
Lobby:
Kids pool:
Our room:
That's the adult pool down there:
We're loving the hotel, but the weather is HOT and we're so tired and gross.
We walked around a little looking for food, but most places were closed (it's 11pm at this point), so we just ordered a bunch of room service.  Baked mustard Tasmanian salmon for me:
Nasi Campur, which is Balinese spicy steamed chicken with shredded coconut, Balinese Satay Lilit and 3 sambals (no idea what any it is, but we wanted to sample some local fare.  It was all pretty good, lots of different flavors):
Spaghetti bolognese for Aaron:
Tropical fruit plate for dessert:
Strawberry milkshake for Aaron:
This is exactly what we needed after a horribly long, tiring day.  Everything was delish!  Tomorrow we explore Bali!

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