Month: February 2005

Well, due to our internet problems, TP has been doing all the blogging lately.  I (jm) thought it was high time to make some random observations of my own about KL so far.

People here wear shoes a lot more than in Jakarta.  There everyone wore flip-flops, even with their uniforms, but here people actually wear nice shoes to work.

Public transportation is very cool.  However, there are several lines here and they are not integrated.  This usually means just a walk across the street to another station and hasn’t been too much of a problem yet. And trains have the added benefit of always taking the same amount of time to get places, unlike cars stuck in traffic.

It’s considered rude to slam car doors.  Our friends told us this to spare us from scowling taxi drivers.

Speaking of taxis, it’s really funny how they work here.  You have to open the door and stick your head in and ask if they’ll take you where you want to go.  Sometimes they just say no.  They never give a reason so we’re left scratching our heads and looking for another one.

Night markets are awesome.  And the produce here looks so good and fresh that we’ll be able to start eating salads again.  In Jakarta we would go out to dinner to get salads because the stuff at the store never looked quite good enough to eat raw.

It’s clean here.  Not only is there not much litter on the ground, the sidewalks aren’t covered in dirt and people actually follow directions and don’t eat or drink on the light rail system.  And the air is much better- we can leave our balcony doors open and get a nice breeze without having our apartment turn black.

Please promise that if you ever make it to KL, you will not take pictures in the mall at the base of the Petronas Towers.  It’s a mall.  I don’t know why all the tourists feel the need to take pictures inside.

It’s really fun being in a place where you hear Malay, Chinese, Tamil and English all the time.  The people watching is great too.  But I think it goes the other way too, because I always feel like everyone is staring at me on the train.  Maybe I’m just being paranoid.

Going to a gym in a mall is a dangerous thing.  I don’t think we’ve gone once yet without buying something for the apartment after working out. 

We got used to the sun rising really early in Jakarta.  Because of the strange way Malaysia has arranged its time zone, it’s still totally dark when we wake up at 7.  This makes it very hard to get up, although it does stay light a lot later.

There are far less small children here than in Indonesia.  I think maybe our development here doesn’t attract as many young families as the one in Indonesia did.  There are lots of school-aged kids in their uniforms though, and they are always cute.

Our realtor lives down the hall from us and has two cats which we are hoping will play with us sometime.  We’ve also seen several funny ones around our development which an added bonus.  They all look healthier and cleaner than the ones in Jakarta which is really nice.  And we seem to have a tiny baby gecko living in our apartment who runs behind the shoe cabinet every morning when we’re going out.  He’s very funny, I’ll try to get a picture of him one of these days.

While we were in Indonesia, we didn’t bother getting internet service in our apartment.  It was a pain, the procedures were confusing, and we decided to just walk to the closest mall if we needed it.  Here in Malaysia, we’re trying to get something hooked up for our swanky new place.  The problem is that Malaysian internet service providers (ISPs, you non-techie people) have weird requirements.  To get DSL, you need, of course, a phone line.  To get that, you need to make a $600 deposit and sign up for an expensive 1 year contract.  That’s dumb, because it prices people like us out of the market.  (They’ll keep the security deposit for the whole year even if you leave the country after six months, and who knows if we’d get it back.)  Then you have to contact the DSL people and get that worked up, which also requires an expensive 1 year contract.  Again, it prices us out of the market for no reason.  You think they’d at least make an option for monthly service, maybe for more money per month but cheap enough to get more customers.  There are tons of foreigners in KL, after all.

What is so weird is the cost of the phone deposit.  Not the DSL router or the cable modem, the phone itself.  $600 for a stupid phone?  You could a phone of equal quality for $12 at Wal-mart.  In Indonesia, it was the same way–our phone deposit was $400–but it was compulsory with the cost of the apartment.  Here we were happy to avoid it, but now we have to deal with the phone company if we want to get this done.  We think that what these security deposits do is provide capital liquidity for these companies, which are probably pretty poorly run.  Or, maybe they take the money, invest it in a 12-month US government bond, and then keep the profit.  Jerks.

What this means is that it’s been a real pain to get to blog lately.  Wish us luck on getting this all sorted out.