Welcome Back to Breakfast with Lisa & Josh!

Number 50?!?!?! 50 weeks of Breakfast with us. Thanks so much for joining us every week. This is our favorite thing. We hope it’s yours too.

Coming to Malaysia, to Kuala Lumpur especially, feels a bit like coming home for me. We just got here yesterday. I’ve been here maybe 20 times in the past 10 years - it’s a massive transit hub for not only Asia, but also to go to Europe and the Middle East, and every time I come here I leave feeling like I want to get back as quickly as possible.

And after a week in the very “we’re not in Kansas anymore”-and-it’s-awesome-Yogyakarta, Indonesia, a bit of a feeling of home, like in Kuala Lumpur (KL from here on out), is what we were all looking forward to. Getting there wouldn’t be so easy, of course, but at least they were straightforward and consistent, and it helps that we’ve done this country hopping thing quite a bit already.

Let’s talk more about Yogyakarta - or Jogja, as the locals call it — the incredibly underrated, beautiful, historical, and fascinating city that just blew us away.

Yogyakarta is a beautiful, massive, bustling former capital city with thousand-year-old temples surrounding it and a fascinating mixture of new and old inside of it. It is home base to the largest Buddhist temple complex and the largest Hindu temple complex in all of Indonesia.

On the streets of Jogja, (at least in the main downtown area called Malioboro) are big new shopping malls and night markets, which you get to primarily via horse-and-carriage and tri-shaws (or becak in Indonesian,) tiny rickshaws pushed along by motorbike. It felt like a city with both modern touches and historical roots at the core. From old to new, while keeping the important traditions alive.

They had recently changed their main street in the city to a pedestrian-only walkway, and moved all of the various street vendors to massive markets or pasars that they built. This gave the main downtown area a more modern feel and more friendly to walking, and it felt like it was working. Every night Malioboro was filled to the brim, particularly in the evening (as it is the month of Ramadan,) with locals and tourists alike who were going up and down the beautiful main drag shopping, eating, and going to the hilariously popular local hangout of a haunted house. Yes, a haunted house in Jogja in April was the biggest thing in the city. The line stretched for blocks and blocks to get in. It must have been good, because the wait was over 2 hours.

Add all of this to the multiple-times-daily prayer calls that boomed across the entire city, and it felt like we were truly experiencing much of Indonesia, far from the few weeks we had in Bali.

After that amazing experience in Yogyakarta, we headed to Kuala Lumpur, and are now having nearly the precise opposite of the experience. We are in a high-rise apartment building that looks directly at the beautiful Petronas towers with an infinity pool on the 50th floor…a high-rise apartment building that looks directly at the beautiful Petronas towers with an infinity pool on the 50th floor. I don't know what else to say. And at $40 per night…woah.

Videos This Week

The Singapore airport is just too much. Best airport in the world. What else is there to say?

GWK is a revelation.

See you next Sunday…ish :)

- josh (and lisa)

Oh, and if you want to learn how we afford to take all these trips after quitting our jobs last year, you’ll likely be interested in our Skillshare course on Travel Hacking and Frequent Flier Miles. It’s been really taking off lately, but we still have a few uses of this link left for those of you who want to see the class for free. It comes with a free month of Skillshare, which is more than enough to watch our class and any of the other great courses on there!

Check it out here: https://skl.sh/lisaandjosh02221

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