The Punch Heard Around the World

The day has finally come! My 7 month journey is finally underway and, well, it got off to a rocky start. I thought I was heading to Beijing, China for a week but when I arrived at the airport, they told me that I needed a "visa" to visit China. My heart instantly fell to the floor as I was unaware that I needed a visa, and it was obviously too late to get one now. Everything that I had booked all went to waste and I was without a flight to Asia! What a nice way to start my trip 😩. I ended up calling the airline and told them to book me the next cheapest flight to Asia. Any country! Any city! I didn't care where. I said goodbye to my mother and sister and told them that I would be heading to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia!

17 hours and 1 layover later, I finally arrived in Kuala Lumpur. I arrived around 12:30 am and because I couldn’t check into my hostel until 12 pm, I decided to just sleep in the airport. When I woke up around 6 am, I took an Uber to my hostel, The Reggae Mansion, and decided to stream the Raiders and Chiefs game while I waited to check in. When I finally got up to my room it was a little past 12 pm, and that’s when I met my first hostel mate, Ross from Scotland. We became best friends at first sight! We spent the day eating local cuisine in Chinatown and walking around the Petronas twin towers. We took some cool photos and then headed back to the hostel to shower up and get ready for the night. The weather in Kuala Lumpur is ridiculously hot and humid. So hot that I was actually sweating while taking a shower, not even kidding. Our hostel was fortunate enough to have air conditioning in our rooms along with a fan, so that was nice. Definitely a place I would stay at again if I ever came back to Kuala Lumpur.

When Ross and I got back to our room, we met another one of our roommates, Alessa, who is from Germany. Luckily for us, our hostel has a cool rooftop bar with a sweet view of the city. So all three of us went upstairs to socialize and that’s when we met Sammy from Australia, Holly and Ben from England, and Amanda from Denmark. We decided to take our little hostel group and go check out downtown Kuala Lumpur. I have no idea where we went except for this little place called Eclipse, I think. It is here where all the drama started. I’ll make a long story short. I was closing out my tab and I gave the guy 40 ringgit (or at least I thought I did) on a 13 ringgit tab. He gave me 37 ringgit back. Needless to say, he messed up and gave me way to much money back & I had no idea. Anyways, the guy started arguing with me and told me that I need to give the money back and I was confused and thought he gave me the exact change, so I had no idea why he was yelling at me. Ben from Britain then started defending me and saying that they needed to give Amanda from Denmark her change back. Let’s just say the situation escalated very quickly. Ben started cussing at the guy while I tried to diffuse the situation. It got to a point where they were going to call the police but instead they decided to kick us out. As we were getting ready to walk out, the guy started calling Holly (Ben’s sister) names of some sort. Ben got pissed and started pointing and shouting at the guys. Then out of nowhere this little Malaysian fellow walks up to Ben and starts throwing punches at him! I was right next to the guy so I reacted the only way I knew how... I put the guy in a choke hold and tried to get him to stop. That obviously wasn’t how they saw it and another guy (a bigger guy) walks towards me and I was thinking, “oh sh*t". The guy threw a punch at me! Luckily I saw it coming and ducked my head down and the guy punched me right in the top of the head. But he didn’t just throw one punch. No no no, he threw three! All landed on the top of my head and I’m pretty sure the punches hurt his hand more than it hurt me. All this happened while I was choking the little Malaysian dude. Ha ha. After the third punch, I decided to let the guy go. Things kind of calmed down after that and then we decided it was time to get the hell out of there. Let’s just say it was a crazy 24 hours for me, but, I wouldn’t change a thing. It was the most fun I’ve ever had while traveling and luckily for me, I still have 6 months and 29 days to make new friends and experience crazy things on this new traventure. Cheers to that.

Outside the Petronas Towers

#KualaLumpur #travel #Asia #Malaysia #PetronasTowers