Author: tompepinsky

Of the 7 hours I (jm) spent at the office today, 6.5 were spent talking with Malaysians.  This is actually quite a lot, usually I get some time to take phone calls, answer emails, and surf the web.  So maybe it was because I saw more people than usual today that I saw more weirdos than normal too.

First there was the Harvard kid of the day.  This boy and his dad sat down and said "we want to apply to Harvard."  I asked where else, they said nowhere, and I kind of didn’t know what to say.  I reminded them that this was the first year ever that more than one Malaysian got in (there were a whopping two this year) and advised that they look into some other schools.  They basically said no. Then they informed me that they were doing "early admission" and he was going to apply for Fall 2007, because everyone in the States applies early to college too.  I don’t know where these people get these ideas.  They certainly don’t get them from actually reading the information they print out from the website, highlight, and then bring in to me to "prove their point".  I politely told them that they probably had to wait a year and take the SATs first.  Then the dad yelled at me for about five minutes because they live 250 miles away and it’s not convenient for them to come back up here to register and take the test.  I told him (less politely by now) that I don’t have any power to rearrange things for him, and told him to just go to Singapore instead, which is 20 minutes from where he lives.  Who knows what they’ll end up doing.

The other really strange one involved a mother and daughter.  The mother is moving to some tiny town in Minnesota in August to marry an American, a retired Vietnam vet.  Her daughter is six months away from finishing high school here and taking her exams.  The mother wanted me to tell her if the girl should go to the US with her and do 12th grade there, or stay here, take the exams, and then do pre-university class work, and then apply to college in the US.  I weighed each option for them, and eventually remarked that I assumed there would be a relative or someone here for the girl to stay with if her mother left her behind.  She said no, they just figured the girl could hang out on her own (she’s 16), they’re keeping the residence here after all.  That was weird.  Especially when not two minutes later, she said that because her daughter is an exceptional student and head of her class, (I think I’ve met more "heads of class" students than there are schools in this country) she wanted to do right by her girl and not "neglect" her.  I was tempted to ask how running off to marry some old dude 10,000 miles away and leaving your kid behind constituted "not neglecting" her.  Then it also occured to me that it was really weird that the mom couldn’t posptone her own trip by six months, so her daughter could finish school here, and then go run off to get married.  There must be something I don’t understand about the situation.

Other than that, it was just a normal day of advising- 2 MBAs, a handful of undergrads, and 6 or 7 Master’s or PhD candidates.

It has been obvious to us that since we moved to Malaysian from Indonesia, stuff has been more likely to go our way.  The way that we like to describe it is that while in the US, things normally work, here in Malaysia, things almost work, while in Indonesia, things almost never worked.  Our visa processes were relatively smooth and straightforward and only took two months.  The mass transportation systems come very close (but certainly not the whole way) to forming a seamless metropolitan mass-transit system.  Our trips to the grocery store have been largely successful.

For the past two days, though, we have been really craving bean sprouts on our food.  Yesterday we were determined to make char kwey teow for dinner, a dish which requires bean sprouts.  Yet try as we might, our giant supermarket did not seem to have any.  Huh?  We mentioned in a post a long time ago that an Indonesian grocery store being out of banana leaves and coconut is like an American grocery store being out of milk and eggs.  Well, in Malaysia, not having bean sprouts is like not having flour.  Totally inconceivable.  Today, we went back to check again for our salad, and they are still out.  All we want is some bean sprouts–we’d be surprised if a supermarket in the US did not have any, so this is extra dumb.  They have also been out of rice vinegar–sort of like an American supermarket being out of regular vinegar.  It is telling that our regular supermarket here is also a Carrefour, France’s global answer to Wal-Mart, which was responsible for our inability to make sweet coconutty deserts steamed in banana leaves in Jakarta.

Our other frustrating issue has been the changes at our gym.  It is in the process of being bought out by an American chain called California Fitness, and downgrading its service level from awesome to terrible.  About two weeks ago, when Betsy was still here, we asked the guys at the gym if we could have new workout cards.  We have already used up the ones they gave us when we arrived.  This created a giant disaster.  Turns out to get new workout cards, you have to sign up for a free weight-training assessment with the new physical trainers.  OK, fine.  Free is good.  Well, not really.  The new physical trainers are incompetent.  First, the guy assigned to us, Anil, called us at 5:25 on Tuesday to inform us that we had an appointment for 5:00 on Tuesday.  We were already at the gym working out at the time, so we missed the call, of course.  Then Anil set up a new appointment for today at 4:30.  Except for today is his day off, which he seems to have forgotten, so we ended up being “assessed” by two numbskulls who know less about weights than we do–which is hard to accomplish.  We insisted that we could wait until we could see a real trainer, but no.  It apparently would be much better if they did a half-ass job assessing us extra-quickly, with Anil calling us back later to set up another free session.  We would like to train with a guy we know named Prabha, but he has been transferred to another gym.  What a mess.  We still don’t have our new cards, which is all we really wanted.

The difference is, local Southeast Asian frustrations are at least the source of a good story.  We will always laugh at our visa issues in Jakarta.  In this case, though, a lousy American corporation has bought up a good local one and is ruining it.  That’s not funny, we can find that at home.  As Dogbert say, just wave your hand and say “Bah!”