Kuching, Malaysia
I picked Kuching as my favorite place because I grew up there as a little kid. The thing that I remember most about Kuching was that there were a lot of cats and cat statues.
Up until I wrote this blog post I did not know why Kuching was known as the city of cats or why there were a bunch of cat statues littered around the city. You can see an example of this in the image I picked. After looking it up in Wikipedia it seems that there are several theories on why the city is named "Kuching" which translates to cat in Malay. One such theory speculates that when James Brooke a British traveler landed in Kuching he asked a local guide what the city was called. The guide misunderstood what he was asking and thought he was pointing at a cat and so he gave him the Malay word for cat which was "Kuching".
I picked Kuching as my favorite place because I grew up there as a little kid. The thing that I remember most about Kuching was that there were a lot of cats and cat statues.
(Kuching Cat Statue: Wikipedia Commons)
Up until I wrote this blog post I did not know why Kuching was known as the city of cats or why there were a bunch of cat statues littered around the city. You can see an example of this in the image I picked. After looking it up in Wikipedia it seems that there are several theories on why the city is named "Kuching" which translates to cat in Malay. One such theory speculates that when James Brooke a British traveler landed in Kuching he asked a local guide what the city was called. The guide misunderstood what he was asking and thought he was pointing at a cat and so he gave him the Malay word for cat which was "Kuching".
Oh wow, how exciting, Adrian: I think you are the first student in this class who grew up in Malaysia. And I never knew about Kuching... what a great anecdote about its name! We do not have a Malaysian reading unit in class, but there is a book of stories from the Malay peninsula by Walter Skeat which is in the class library: I wonder if any of those stories are ones you have heard... Malay Magic: Being an Introduction to the Folklore and Popular Religion of the Malay Peninsula
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