So after my first couple of very hectic days I'm now in some kind of a routine, or at least everything is starting to make a little bit more sense!

Saturday was my first day working on my project and was great fun! It's a place called Cloudbreak Development Centre (www.mycloudbreak.com if anyone's interested!) and they offer all kinds of creative workshops for local children and businesses as well as organising sending volunteers out to work in more deprived areas. The weekend is filled up with children's workshops which basically consist of playing lots of drama games and running around! It's really interesting to see the difference between Malaysian and British kids. Everything the Malaysian children do has to have an academic point to it so mostly their weekends are spent being tutored or doing homework or having sports lessons. They do very little just for fun so the workshops we do have to be portrayed as building leadership or teamwork skills which I suppose is true but it also just lets them play and be more creative.

We've got another workshop this evening with a group of young adults who are working towards coming to London on an exchange with the Soho Theatre so that's likely to be a bit more intense improvisation stuff but all the group are really nice and great fun to work with.

Then tomorrow we're changing projects. Cloudbreak has links with all kinds of community projects in and around KL and are setting up a new one with a residential centre for disadvantaged Malaysian women. They come from all over Malaysia and stay in KL for a year having English classes and doing vocational work like cookery or kindergarten training. We'll be going in for a week to do some more creative work with them as they have to stay in the centre the whole time but don't have any activities beyond their classes. It's a bit daunting as we'll be the first volunteers to go in so have no real idea what to expect and will probably be thrown in the deep end giving English classes but it'll be really good to do some dance classes with them and to get to meet a group of people whose parents haven't paid for their classes but who will really benefit from some different activities.

Apart from work I've been getting to grips with the city a bit more. I'm staying in a volunteer apartment with 2 others in the suburbs, not with a family as they originally told me. So despite not having Malaysian meals cooked for me every night I've been managing pretty well... There's a huge food court about 10 minutes walk away which has stalls serving every kind of food possible so you can order from as many of them as you can eat and then sit in a big communal area and people watch. I'm determined to get round every single stall before I leave but there's so much it might prove impossile even for me!

Being a little way outside the city centre means I haven't had the chance to do too much more sightseeing. Yesterday we had a free morning so I had ambitious plans to go round the Lake Gardens which have a bird park, deer park, butterfly garden, orchid garden and hibiscus garden as well as the lakes themselves. As it turns out the bird garden was so huge that took up the whole morning so a few more trips will be needed after all! It was well worth taking time over though, it's an absolutely huge area where most of the birds are free to fly around and came complete with monkeys and, my favourite, giant ladybirds!

I think that's about everything I've been up to so far. Keep in touch everyone!

xx