My Malaysia Issue 1 (take 2)

Insight from Kuantan, June 2005

For the most part Malaysians show their smiling faces and greet you in passing, except when I am with Chelsea as Muslims cannot touch dogs, so there are occasional shrieks of hysteria or the admission, “I’m scared of dogs”. No wonder, many Chinese homes have ferocious guard dogs which pace by the front gates…I’m scared of them too!
One day a Malay woman driving a van with numerous children inside stopped to watch Chelsea and me at the edge of the road for a long time, the little ones all smiling and pointing at the dog. I wondered what the mother was saying about our gentle Golden Retriever! The Malay word for dog is “anjing” which the children yell out loudly!

Driving on the left side of the road is still a little hairy one month after our arrival…especially when having to watch for motorscooters on all sides dart in and out of traffic. At least when the light turns green, only one lane of traffic gets to go so there is no having to cross the oncoming traffic. Some large intersections have countdown lights, either in red (to tell you when the light will turn green) or in green (to tell you how long you have to get across the intersection)! It is easy to forget that you put the blinker on with your RIGHT hand and when you are the driver, you reach over your RIGHT shoulder for the seat belt! We ordered a 2.4 litre Toyota Camry for me which took about two weeks to arrive…Pat’s employees think he is very rich to be able to afford such a luxurious and expensive car (they would have bought only the 2 litre model!).

There is a small but well-stocked stationery shop near the ex-pat grocery store about a mile down the road. I bought a few greeting cards (in English) upon arrival, only to find I also needed to buy glue to seal them! The grocery store is a little more expensive than the bigger ones but it is handy and sells a good variety of goods. For example, eggs come in plastic crates of ten, not a dozen! They are also not refrigerated, which I find a bit disconcerting! There are lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, two types of mangos (one is small and yellow and very sweet, the other is green, longer and sweet but not as juicy), two sizes of pineapples (less than 50 cents each!), delicate butter lettuce, sweet and very fat carrots wrapped in pairs in plastic wrap, lovely tasty tomatoes which are all uniformly small in size, grapes from Australia and/or New Zealand, etc. There are also, of course, many types of produce that I don’t recognize and for which I need to use my Malay dictionary! The fishmonger is quickly becoming friends with Pat and sells him huge shrimp (called prawns here, like in the U.K.) for about $4.00 per pound. Recently we had some that worked out to be about 8 count! They sell wine and liquor in the grocery stores but there are also two good wine shops in town and we are getting to know the Chinese owners of one…to the point where one Saturday, he invited us to the back room for some lunch of fish broth over noodles, with add-ins such as lettuce, pineapple, carrots, chillies.

The new Electrolux washer and dryer in the house take forever to complete a cycle…I fear our clothes will soon wear out completely! Even the Econowash takes a full two hours, so just exactly what is being economized?!? A fold-up drying rack placed outside the back door saves on dryer power, provided it doesn’t rain during the afternoon!

There is the occasional “house lizard” roaming around…the first one we found in the dishwasher! The next one was just outside our bedroom door one morning. They are a most unattractive sickly brown colour and leave a dropping not unlike mouse dirt here and there! (Yuck!)

Our Chinese landlord and landlady are very friendly and helpful, especially when attending to things which go wrong in the new house, i.e. power problems as a result of one of the garden lights which was set too low and shorts out because of the water table. We have had the carpenter, electrician, A/C and dishwasher repairman here in record time to fine tune certain problems. Asian custom seems to dictate that it is perfectly OK to ask how much something costs when you admire it, so I find myself frequently justifying what we paid in North America for this and that to Mary and Ho!

We are in the middle of a construction zone on our street…beside us a semi-detached house is being built and we have watched the footings poured with cement, now the reinforced columns are being poured, by hand with buckets of cement! There is a constant din of noise also from behind us and across the street where two more houses are partly done. We observed the brick wall being built around “the compound” (or yard), then it was covered with stucco and smoothed out in the house across from us. Most of this work was done by a Chinese lady! No one seems to like the look of brick as each house and wall is made of stucco. The roofs are tiled, usually red, sometimes orange or even blue. The environmentalists among you will be happy to know that everyone has solar panels on the roof instead of a hot water heater. Our landlord had a good laugh when I asked where the tank was so I could turn down the thermostat a little…we found it awfully hot when we first moved in! There is obviously no such thing as “cold” water coming right from the tap! Most people have a car port instead of a proper garage, and it is beautifully covered in attractive tiles from the entrance gates (automatic door opener) right to the front door. It is customary for the maid to sweep and mop these tiles frequently; otherwise you would be tracking dirt and grit inside the house.






Our yard is lush and green with various palm trees, birds of paradise, ginger plants and other tropical plants whose names I do not know! My landlady felt that we didn’t know how to water properly when we first arrived, so she has arranged for her maid to come daily around 8 a.m. to do the job. For that I pay her 50 ringit (about $12.50) per month and I don’t get all hot and sweaty first thing in the morning! We do find it odd, however, that even after a severe thunderstorm with heavy rains overnight, she is still there watering in the morning! There must be no such thing as “overwatering”!





We have an Indian maid, Mani, who comes two afternoons per week for about 6 hours. She irons, cleans the bathrooms and the floors and dusts, plus washes the tiles outside once a week. She has worked for ex-pats before and is very pleasant and honest. I pay her 300 ringit per month or about $75.00. Personally, I feel this is akin to highway robbery, but when in Malaysia… (more next time)