Category: General

That means "languages."  In Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Melayu, you form plurals by just doubling the noun.  Very convenient–no other rules to remember.  Although it can be difficult with more complicated words like keberangkatan.

Since we’ve been here, we’ve learned that Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Melayu are not quite as identical as we thought.  There are lots of little differences, and a couple huge differences, so we’ve been muddling through.  It’s funny that everytime we open our mouth, people immediately know that we learned Indonesian first and are now trying to make the switch to Melayu.  In terms of grammar and syntax and rules, everything is the same, so that’s nice.  Pronunciation is almost identical, but there are a couple of differences.  At the end of words, the vowel a (like "ah") turns into a sound that’s sort of like the u in "put."  So phrases like apa ada (AH-pah AH-dah, or "what’s up?) turn into something like apu adu.  It sounds funny to us, and when we say it we often giggle, leaving Malays wondering what’s wrong with us.

In a lot of cases, one letter in a word will change.  Often u turns to o, but sometimes the other way around.  So rusak (broken) turns to rosak and kerupuk turns to keropok, but obat turns to ubat. That’s not so hard, though, and we’re figuring things out.

In certain cases, there are different words in Indonesian and Melayu.  The best example is cakap (to speak), which is berbahasa (to engage in language) or bilang (to speak) in Indonesian.  Other examples include instances where word that has been borrowed from Dutch into Indonesian is still the original proto-Malay in Melayu, like mobil (car) in Indonesian but kendaraan in Melayu; more often a word has been borrowed from English into Melayu but not from Dutch into Indonesian, like loket (counter) in Indonesian being kaunter in Melayu or berijin (licensed) in Indonesian being lesen in Melayu.  You just have to practice these.

The hardest part is when a word in Indonesian has a different meaning in Melayu.  This leads to funny interactions.  The worst is the Indonesian pair boleh (may; to be permitted to) and bisa (can; to be able to) which have the exact opposite meanings in Melayu.  We are perenially wondering why Malaysians are telling us that it’s very cool that we are allowed to speak Melayu.  Then there is "to want," which is ingin or mau in Indonesian but hendak in Melayu.  This often gets shortened to nak.  In Indonesian, nak is a casual way to say "no," more often pronounced as ndak.  Other ones just leave us puzzled.  The word lumayan means "OK" or "not bad" in Indonesian, but means something along the lines of "great" or "handsome" in Melayu.  The word enak in Indonesian means "delicious" or "comfortable", but if you want to say "comfortable" in Melayu, you better use the word nyaman, or your taxi driver will wonder why you’re telling him that it’s very delicious to ride in a cab.  (This happened the other day.)

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.