Yesterday, I took a seven-hour bus ride from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia. There is something inherently liberating and wonderful about traveling alone to a country you've never been to before. I can easily get lost or get killed in a freak accident in the middle of nowhere, but there I was, sitting on my lone side seat with nothing but a backpack and a hand purse in a bus full of strangers with passports from Indonesia, the Phillipines and other surrounding countries.

Coming to Singapore did not quite give me the inward jolt of entering another country. After all, it is a highly developed city-state and everyone speaks English anyway. For the lack of a better comparison, I consider Singapore as the Orange County of Southeast Asia--a safe, clean country, almost to the point of being sterile. It is the kind of sheltered, highly regulated bubble-environment that parents would trust their kids to go study abroad for four months.

Entering Malaysia for the first time was another story. Through my bus window, I saw young boys in school uniforms, women covered from head-to-toe in black except for a single slit of skin around their eyes, jaded-looking teenagers navigating their motorbikes through traffic. Unlike Singapore, there is graffitti on the walls and litter on the streets. Finally, i thought, a place that is a little rough around the edges.

The bus kept driving along. I fell asleep for a while and when I woke up, the city has disappeared and instead, there was an infinite expanse of green outside my window. As far as the eye can see, nothing but a sea of palm trees covered in vines and other knotted jungle foliage, broken by the occassional billboard advertising potato chips or tourist traps. For probably the first time since I came here, I felt very calm inside. After some time, I fell back asleep. We still had several hours to go before we finally reached our destination.

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We (as in Nabiha and I) are going to leave soon to haggle for some cute shoes, but when I come back, I want to tell you more about smoking hookah at one in the morning and how the live musicians broke into a cover of 'Hey Jude' and it was such a wonderfully perfect moment.