Not mentioned in the previous blog posts is that just before leaving Thailand, Troy discovered that his camera had decided to become not properly responsive. Unsure about what to do about this so close to the end of our trip, he reached out to Olympus Malaysia to see if they had any ideas. We were shocked when they told him that upon arriving in our first Malaysian destination, Penang, he could meet up with an Olympus "Visionary" who would lend him a camera for the duration of our stay in the city. We were skeptical about this generous idea, but sure enough, on our first night in Penang, our Visionary arrived at our hotel's doorstep on his scooter ready with a camera for Troy. What a lucky gift! Better yet, once in Kuala Lumpur, Olympus Malaysia was also able to set Troy up with another camera for that city's visit. He then also discovered that a photographer that he follows, Robin Wong, was going to be in KL (as the cool kids call it) while we were scheduled to be there providing three photography workshops that we promptly signed up for. The photography gods were kind to us in Malaysia, weren't they?!

So as we visited KL in our previous travel year, we were content to just take it easy and sleep in, eat good food, and work on our photography. We attended Olympus workshops on street photography, food shots, and editing software. Troy discovered that there is a fun, creative little community of Olympus photographers in KL that hopefully exists similarly at home if we look hard enough? And so we learned some new ways to use our cameras, and learned that the right food shot may well just score you a free goodie from its corresponding establishment if you hashtag it well! (We then spent the next few days trying to create mouth-watering photos of our food and drinks everywhere we went, but alas, no freebies.) It was a great opportunity to even just have conversations with different people as we have felt on this leg of our 2-year travel journey, we have not met nearly as many people as we did during the first year. Perhaps because we have joined less day tours this time which is where we often found our best interactions? Anyways, it was a great opportunity to feel like we we were back in the real world for a bit!