Malaysia: Multicultural Penang
Our trip to Malaysia in early 2020 was completely unexpected and entirely unplanned. We ended up traveling there because we were already on vacation in Thailand when the first news of the Covid-19 outbreak in China reached us. It was pretty surreal at first - there we were on the island of Koh Samui with a small group of our fellow foreign teachers from the PRC, ready to celebrate the wedding of two close friends - and suddenly we all started receiving emails from our universities telling us not to return until this new "flu-like" outbreak had run its course. We were saddened by the emerging stories of people becoming seriously ill in Wuhan, and worried about how long the outbreak might last, but none of us realized at the time what it would become. So we decided to make the best of the situation and do a little traveling while we waited things out. At the time Covid had not reached any other countries, or even many other parts of China, so we were not concerned about travel
