Some photos from our trip to Asia (so far!). We came to Singapore to present a paper at a subconference of ACL, the major computational linguistics conference. Some things we’ve seen on the way:

Sky over Guangzhou

Customs form in Singapore

Palm forests, on our bus ride through Malaysia this afternoon.
We rode from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, and saw basically nothing but palm trees as
far as the eye could see in every direction; very few people.

Food at a rest stop, Malaysia

Graffiti in Chinatown, Kuala Lumpur. ISA is the Internal Security Act, a law passed
during the crackdown on the Malaysian Communist Party but still in effect forty years later.
The law allows the government to detain people with no cause for long periods of time.

KL was apparently all but shut down last weekend by huge protests against the ISA.
The newspaper today had a lot of stories about the aftermath of that (and a lot of crazy
pro-ISA editorials), but there wasn’t much sign of it in the city as far as we could tell.

Less political graffiti, Chinatown

More political graffiti. I’m not sure exactly what DSA is.

Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur. These were the largest buildings
in the world for six years or so. They are still indescribably huge.
Silhouetted in front is Justin, who’s co-presenting our paper at ACL.

People taking their pictures in front of the Towers.

Tomorrow night we fly back to Singapore. More pictures to come, but who knows how long it will be!

August 4th, 2009 | Category: photos | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL