Butterflies and Islamic Art

Wednesday started out at the Butterfly Park in the Lake Gardens district. This is supposedly the world's largest butterfly park so we were definitely interested in checking it out. I'm not sure if it's truly the largest, but it was big, and more importantly, it was very nice and have all sorts of exotic butterflies we'd never seen before.

Eleanor, who is a Butterfly Park veteran, was looking forward to feeding her friends the turtles again. Here, she is showing off the food that she is feeding to the guys in the lake there.

We saw many butterflies we had never seen before. Most of them proved difficult to photograph, as they were constantly moving, but we saw every color of the rainbow, and some of the butterflies had 7-8" wingspans. A few of them did pause long enough for a photo, here are a couple of examples.

This second one is Malaysia's national butterfly. It's hard to tell from the photo, but this guy has a 7" wingspan.

Katie and I posed for a quick snapshot while we were in the Park.

After the Butterfly Park, we headed to the Islamic Arts Museum. We chose this museum over the National Museum because we have been interested in the Islamic and Muslim aspects of Malaysia and wanted to learn more about it. We're glad we made that choice, the museum was fabulous and unique and helped us learn how Islam has contributed to Malaysia's unique blend of cultures and religions. No photos are allowed in the galleries, so I was only able to take this picture of the outside of the museum.

Inside, we learned about the origins of Islam and how it came to Southeast Asia. There was a great special exhibit tracing Mohammed's journey from Mecca to Medina where he founded the world's first mosque. In the architectural hall there were scale models of many of the world's important mosques, which was very interesting because mosques are completely different in various parts of the world. For instance, in China, you could easily mistake a mosque for a Buddhist temple, since the mosques there have no domes or minarets and instead utilize oriental-style pagodas. We also had lunch here, which consisted of some of the best middle eastern food I've ever eaten. From the upper levels you can get a great view of the National Mosque, which is just across the street. Finally, we visited the gift shop, where we located the perfect fabric to hang from our Sarawakian fabric hanger that we found at the Kuching bazaar.