Experience with housing as an expat in Malaysia

I was living in an apartment in one of Kuala Lumpur's suburbs: Bangsar. This area is one of the more expensive neighbourhoods to live, and used to be one of the most happening places in Kuala Lumpur. The last two years the clubbing and restaurant scene moved from Bangsar to Kuala Lumpur, but there are still a lot of nice restaurants (Malay, Chinese, Indian and Western) and food stalls in the area. The suburb also has its own shopping malls, so there is no need to always travel to the more crowded city centre of Kuala Lumpur for groceries or other basic needs. I thought it was a very nice place to live, away from the busy, noisy and more polluted city centre of Kuala Lumpur. On the other hand, it was not the best way of mingling in the real Malaysian life.
The company offered to help me with finding accommodation. I told them I would rather do it myself, because I was afraid if they would help me I would end up in an apartment alone. And I was looking for a house to share with other international interns. I found this apartment after contacting another student from the University who just finished his internship in Kuala Lumpur. He told me some of his Dutch friends in KL had a spare room and after emailing them it was quickly agreed that I would move in.
I was living with three other Dutch interns. It was nice to share our experiences and to undertake a lot of activities and trips together. On the one hand it was fun to live with other Dutch interns as we were on the same level on practically everything, on the other hand it would have been nice to live with other international students to learn more about their daily life and rituals.
Our 12 storey flat was stated on a hill, and we were lucky our apartment on the 10th floor faced the skyline of KL. Truly a magnificent view. The apartment consisted of a living room, a kitchen, three bedrooms with attached bathrooms and a maid’s room. There was a swimming pool at the condominium and there was a 24-hour guard service.
Although this sounds very Western and expensive, a lot of Malay people lived in the condominium. Because we lived near to the Pantai Medical Centre, one of the bigger hospitals in KL, our condominium was an excellent place to live for the nurses. I’m still not sure how many of them lived together in one apartment, but it was definitely more than four people. Every morning literally hundreds of nurses walked to the hospital together. When you imagine they all were about 1.60 metres tall, around 17 years old, they all wore the same white outfit with a white scarf and most them were too shy to look you in the eyes, it was really hard to see a difference between them. You could easily notice that these girls were Muslim and still quite young: every time one of my roommates – or better, all of us at once – came across them they would start giggling. In the beginning most of them even didn’t dare to go in the same elevator with us! Every time we were in the pool we were quite an attraction: the girls would hide themselves behind the curtains and tried to spy on us.
For the first two months we did not have a maid, simply because we were not used to having one. We cleaned ourselves, did our own laundry and did our own dishes, just as we would in the Netherlands. One day when we were visited by two handymen who were there to repair our washing machine. When I offered them something to drink - like I would do in the Netherlands - they were quite surprised already and politely just asked for some water. But when I cleaned two glasses myself they were flabbergasted. They immediately asked why in earths name I was doing my own dishes! When I replied that we didn’t have a maid and that we did everything ourselves they found that very hard to believe. After all, we were Western, so they assumed we had the money to hire a maid.
One of my colleagues attended me on the fact that it’s a good thing to employ local people and besides that it’s a luxury, it’s a good way for the Malays to earn some money. So eventually we hired a maid who cleaned for three hours once a week (for an amount of money a Dutch maid would not even clean for one hour). She sometimes brought her husband and daughter to help her out, so they would only have to clean one hour altogether.