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Malaysia |
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Malaysia - Initial thoughts...
The food here is good. Of course it all smells like fish and sometimes, walking past the restauraunts, where there's that heavy humid mix of cigarrete smoke, and cooking fumes from the curries, the fish, and the fried noodles, and naan, and roti. The food here is, mostly a mix of South Indian, Thai, and Chinese. Somehow sits really heavy in my stomach all the time.
Anyhow, Malaysia is hot, and the work is somewhere between me sitting and wondering just how useless I can feel out here, and trying to make it look like I'm doing real work out here.
Plus it's kind of hot, So it's like I want to lay under a tree and sleep all day. or at least I seem to be running from one air conditioned building, to the car, to another building. I have to turn down the a/c in the hotel. Just the 10-15 degree temperature shocks might not be so good. (outside it's between 85-90) and probably inside it's probably 70-75 degrees.
Even the Burger King sells a salmon burger out here.
The hotel I stay in although not quite five star service, is definatley close. Being a Sheraton, it's deserving of it's name, even if the rooms could stand to be a little newer, and I was hoping for the thick sweet sleeper beds, alas it doesn't exist too much here. Plus that heavy humid stench of stale cigarette smoke, and
I'm not staying at the holiday villa this time. The place with the brothel in the basement, and where I'm sure if you look around you'll see prostitutes walking the halls.
The Thai place we went to last night, even by my standards, the Tomyam soup was amazingly spicy.
Malaysians have some strange cars. And although they're at least twice as much in the US. Yet the price of gasoline is subsidized. They still have odd tarrifs which make malaysian cars cheap (Protons) and some foreign cars very expensive. One of my co-workers Mak, has owned an Atezza, in the US it's known as an IS300. In Malaysia, I guess you can get them with a very high revving Yamaha made 2.0 litre 4 cylinder, which actually puts out more power (but less torque) than the six. Combined with the lower weight. It's tempting.
Anyhow, Mak had bought the car used, for probably RM160,000, or over $50K US. And he'd gotten it into a wreck, where the the right front quarter behind the front wheel was smashed in. I'm surprised that he's not more hurt, because remember the driver is on the right side of the car here too.
So we went to the shop where he was getting his car fixed, and it was the spookiest thing I've ever seen. A real chop shop, the kind that you only see in movies, with car parts all over the place, a whole lot of mercedes benzes in various states of dissasembly, and a host of other cars. It was raining, and the lighting in the shop wasn't so great. There were car parts all over the place, and
He quoted that all the work was costing about $6000 US to fix his car. In the US the car would have been totaled. Because all the labor needed to do all that work
updated 7 April 2006