Category: General

Today has gone a little better.  We looked at an apartment just two flights up from where our friends are staying, and it looks like it will work.  TP was sold the moment we walked in and saw a poster of a hot 80s babe in a bikini playing a Flying-V guitar.  JM was not so sold on the poster, and may have to find a beefcake to match, but also liked the apartment.  Aside from a good thick layer of grime (the previous tenants were British; figures) (jm did not endorse that comment) and some unidentified condiments in the fridge, the apartment is just fine.  Two big bedrooms, two bathrooms, a nice sized kitchen, and a good living room.  Which means that we will be good to go when it comes to having people visit us.  This means you, dear reader.  Right now we are waiting for the landlord to complete the process of cleaning the place and re-furnishing all the broken stuff, so we hope to move in within a couple days.

We also took a cab over to the U of M library right near us.  Turns out it’s a bit too far to walk and the bus service is unfathomable, but it’s just far enough that a cab will drive you and it costs only about a dollar.  The library will suit my (TP’s) purposes just fine, and it appears that they will let me in as a guest researcher without having to pay any fees.  It also happens to be near the U of M student canteen, meaning institutional-quality Malay, Indian, and Chinese food will be available for cheap whenever we want.

Tonight we plan to head out for a night on the town with the other Fulbright students who live in KL.  Actually, three of the four of them live in this complex as well.  It’s just a little slice of ‘Merica here.

In case you are wondering, we have seen the Petronas Towers.  They are very pretty at night, but not so much during the day.  (The Petronas Towers were the tallest buildings in the world until a couple months ago.)  For some reason the towers don’t look that tall, though.  We saw the Sears Tower this summer and thought that it looked much more impressive.  At any rate, the Towers are cool, and we will have a view of them from our apartment.  The neat thing about the design of the Towers is how they draw from Islamic architecture.  So far, no sightings of Michelle Yeoh rappelling down the side of them, but we will keep you posted.

We spent today working on both getting our visas and finding an apartment to live in.  We have had some luck with the latter.  Currently, we are waiting for a realtor named Rozliza to call us back and show us an apartment in the same complex as the one where we are staying right now.  It would be nice if we could find one, because this is a very nice place, relatively close to the subway, and seems to be affordable.

Visas have been less successful. Go figure.  We have been instructed by the Malaysian American Commission on Educational Exchange to go to TP’s sponsor institution, the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia–National Malaysian University.  Supposedly, we go there, tell the Political Science Department that we have arrived, and then they take us to the International Relations Office, where somehow our visas appear.  Not exactly.  To begin with, it was impossible to arrange a meeting by telephone with the professor, the dean of the Social Sciences faculty, or anyone who might help us.  So we decided to just go down there and find someone.  It’s forty minutes by commuter rail south of town, pretty much in the middle of nowhere.  And the commuter rail is twenty minutes by subway from where we are.  When you get to the UKM stop on the commuter rail, you need to take a taxi or a bus.  We didn’t know about the bus, so we took a cab.  But we made it.

Upon arriving at the Faculty of Social Sciences, the entire administration seems to have collectively become useless.  No one knew what to do, they just knew that they couldn’t do it.  To give them credit, they may not be used to seeing Fulbright students.  Anyhoo, we finally ascertained that we had to go to the Pusat Pengajian Siswazah, which means Center for Student Something to get some unidentified forms.  We asked, where is this building?  They said, "oh, very far."  We said, how do you get there?  They said, "oh, it’s too far and hot to walk.  I guess you’ll have to walk."  And then they said that they were closed until two (it was 12:45 at the time).  So we wasted some time finding grub, and then started on the UKM Death March, which involved taking the "shortcut," which means over the hill instead of around it.

We discovered that this is one of the times that a little piece of the West was transferred into the East wholesale, with little success.  What do colleges in the US look like?  They are spread out with wide open lawns.  When you recreate that on the equator–cutting down all the shade trees and making big sidewalks that meander along big lawns–the results are not pretty.  It basically means creating a desert with 90% humidity and no way to get anywhere except for to walk.  Suffice it to say, it got pretty hot.  There’s a book by a Yale Political Science professor named James Scott, whose research has always focused on Malaysia, called Seeing Like A State, which introduces the subject of how developing countries try to emulate developed countries in big ticket infrastructure projects (like creating universities) and create new disasters.  We can see his point.

We actually found the office on the third try, after about a mile walk.  Whew, sweaty.  It didn’t open until 2:15, but that’s neither here nor there at this point.  TP bought his forms (they didn’t want anything to do with JM), sat down, and realized that they were for admission.  So essentially TP applied to the university, and will hear back in a couple of weeks.  Of course, TP did not have all of his forms–like four copies of my diplomas from Brown and Yale–but we managed to get around that.  Only after we hear back from UKM can we start on the visa.

What this means is, screw it, we’re not wasting time at UKM.  TP has applied for a non-degree student program, which means he doesn’t have to spend any time there, which means he will not.  Even if the visa does not come through, we have a three month visa, and the "Singapore Run" is common and totally cool.  MACEE even told us we should do that if UKM gives us any trouble.  Plus, the Universiti Malaya is closer (like, within walking distance from where we hope to live), bigger (largest and most complete library in the country), and better (it’s the Harvard of Malaysia).  We will check it out tomorrow.  If their website is correct in saying that college/university students from anywhere in the world can use the library for free at all times, then we see no reason to fiddle much with UKM much anymore.