Malaysia: mosques and cockroaches

[juliet]

I've spent the last couple of days on trains getting from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur (which is where I am now). Unfortunately the free Museum of National History that used to be here has closed down, so I pottered around town a bit (they have a lot of mosques and buildings whose architecture is mosque-like) and then came back to the hotel to have a nap, knit a bit, and wash my clothes. It's very glamorous, this travelling business. Further wanderings around town this evening to locate a restaurant led to the sighting of numerous cockroaches roaming the streets. I think the only thing I wish to say about this is "ewwwww".

I did like Penang, though - it felt bizarrely like a UK seaside village, without looking really anything like it. I don't recall hearing seagulls, but it did feel like I should be hearing them. Maybe it was the light. I got the ferry back across the bay (it's 25p to get from Butterworth to Penang but free to go back the other way) at sunset, which was absolutely beautiful behind the hills at the back of Georgetown.

Then I spent an exciting 3 hours sat in the station, due to the 2 hr delay in the train arriving. After we all piled on, the lights went out and stayed out for the next hour while the carriage was repeatedly shunted out of the platform, backwards and forwards a lot in alarming jerks, and then back into the platform. I think we eventually left just after midnight, over 3 hours late, and were nearly 4 hours late in to KL this morning. On the upside, this meant that the projected (and very unfriendly) arrival time of 05:20 was instead 09:10 which is significantly easier when one is looking for a hotel room.

Singapore tomorrow - looking forward to meeting up with euphistica & jhaelan! Though my train doesn't leave till 14:00 (hopefully...) so I intend to spend the morning seeking out the Very Tall Tower that they have here. Possibly this is the same one that I saw this evening all lit up with lovely pink sparkly fairy lights.

A thought that occurred to me earlier: despite the fact that many of the countries I've been in recently have very hot weather, open gutters, and erratic sewage systems, I haven't noticed anything particularly smelling bad. This in contrast with India, where pretty much everywhere the streets smell bad (rotting rubbish in the gutter, basically). I don't know if SEAsia is better at street cleaning (maybe this is the function of the cockroaches?) or if there's a different attitude to dropping rubbish - the streets certainly look cleaner as well as smelling cleaner. (Here, I think there's a 500RM fine for dropping litter, but I have no idea whether it's enforced - I think we have similar fines in the UK but I see more litter around than I do here.)

The other very obvious thing about Malaysia is the presence of 3 quite distinct cultural and ethnic groups - Chinese, Indian, and Malay - but I haven't been here for long enough nor paid enough attention to comment any further. My understanding is that these days things are calm but socially speaking the various groups don't overlap much. Multiple-language signs are common - and lots of ads, signs, etc are in English.

Comments

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

It rains a whole lot more in south-east Asia than it does at this time of year in India - I remember coming to Bangkok from Delhi, thinking how strange the sky looked, and realizing that the difference was that it had clouds in. So there's the chance for rotting stuff to get swept away.

If I remember correctly, there are sewer-like things installed under many of the pavements in Malaysia.