Visa woes, Chinese New Year and a lot of karaoke

After a four hour bus ride (it was supposed to be 2), I arrived back in KL. The following morning I made my way to the Chinese Embassy to pick up my passport. I decided to head on over to the US Embassy and get some extra pages added as mine only had one blank page. I was amazed at the crowd outside. There were at least 200 people lining the streets waiting to get in during the 2 hour window to process their visa applications. As a citizen, I just walked in. I even got the visitor's badge that didn't require me to have an escort. Surprisingly, the additional pages were free and inserted while I waited.
I got back to the guesthouse around 12pm, surfed the internet for a while before chatting it up with some people and watching a movie. I was in a dorm room, so it was much easier to meet new people and go out on the town during the past couple of days. I met some really nice girls from Canada. They had just come from Tanzania and had some great stories and picture (now it's on the "to do" list), two Dutch girls on their way home from a 6 month study abroad in Australia, two Brits on their way to Australia to work for a year, another British girl who has been living and working in Miami for 3 years but is travelling for about a year, and many others. Since I had a couple of days to kill in KL, I became a social butterfly and rallied to troops to go out and see the city at night.
Most of the bar around the guesthouse are for tourists - therefore beer costs about $10 a pint. The local bars, where it costs about $3 a pint, are all karaoke joints. And the Malaysians are pretty serious about their karaoke. I sang along to a lot of songs, but the only one where I actually held the mike was "We Are the World."
It wasn't a bad couple of days in KL, just not all that exciting. Chinese New Year celebrations were pretty mild, so no fun stories there.

Now I'm in Siem Reap. I'll be here until the 22nd. Tomorrow morning, I will rise at 5am to go to Angkor Wat to see the sun rise. Hope to get some good photos!