After a deep 10 hour sleep, we woke up at 7am this morning completely refreshed and ready to explore. Our breakfast was included with the hotel, and was advertised as being "western," but I was most pleased to discover that in addition to the standard eggs, sausage and toast, this also included shumai, chicken congee, curried rotis, and fresh tropical fruit.
With a huge breakfast in our bellies, we headed off to the first stop of our day, one of the many Chinese Buddhist temples embedded into the bustling streets of the city. The temple is painted in bright, cheerful colors and was crowded this morning with worshippers paying respects to their elders, lighting their joss sticks and filling the temple with their rich, musky fragrance.
Next stop, we visited the city hall, which looked a bit like Disneyland's Space Mountain to me. A beautiful arcade with lush tropical flowers lined the walkway up to the building. The city of Kuching was once a mountain run over by wild cats, thus the name literally translates to "wild cats."
Cat statues are all over the city, although this white one that is crushing Jack is reputed to be the gatekeeper of the town and will give the visitor luck if you touch it's left paw with your right hand. Next, we made our way over the Sarawak Museum, filled with information about local culture, people, wildlife, and Malaysian art and artifacts. 
For lunch, we nervously attempted a meal at a street vendor in Chinatown. Jack ordered a rice plate with vegetables and chicken, while I ordered the curry mee, mee meaning noodles. We looked around to make sure that the other customers were having ice in their drinks before chasing our food with coke, which tasted surprisingly different. No high fructose corn syrup. 9 ringgits for the whole meal, which equals out to less than $3 for the both of us!
We figured we would have about 2 hours before food poisoning would set in if it did, so we decided to check out the Main Bazaar, a bustling section along the riverfront selling just about everything, from fresh fish (not on ice!), to hand-carved wood art, to colorful batiks and textiles, to unidentifiable fruit, to women's bras and granny panties. Many of the locals could tell that we were tourists, even though most of the population here is Chinese. They seemed to get a big kick out of the fact that we are Chinese people but born in the America. One fish monger wanted to set me up with a "mate" until he realized that the guy standing next to me, (Jack,) was my husband. By 4pm, we were understandably beat, both of us wilting in the heat and humidity.
We headed back to our hotel and rested for a while before hitting the fitness room to work off some of this glorious food. I think we both must have been a little jet lagged because after we showered, we crashed until 8:30 pm. Although neither one of us was really hungry when we woke up, dinner seemed like the next logical activity, so we ventured out once again in search of a local seafood food court recommended to us by our tour escort, called Top Spot.
What we found was completely overwhelming at first sight. It seemed like a food court- lots of different restaurants sharing a large common eating space filled with tables and chairs. However, the displays of food were all raw; multiple kinds of fresh fish (this time on ice!), small, colorful crabs, ginormous prawns, and all sorts of crisp green vegetables that we'd never seen before.
Bewildered, we sat down at a table in front of the vendor that seemed to have the freshest fish with the most ice, and checked out a menu. We ended up ordering a tofu clay pot in a delicious, rich, chicken broth, a whole sea bass steamed "Cantonese style" with soy sauce, ginger and scallions, and a vegetable we didn't recognize, recommended to us by our waitress, which turned out to be fiddleheads in a garlic oyster sauce. Topped off by 2 huge bottles of icy cold Tsing Tao beer. The tab for such a feast? 71 ringgits, or about 20 bucks for the two of us. Not bad!
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