In my free time I usually hung out with my flat mates. I finished work around 05:30 pm which meant I was home around 06:15 pm. It took me 5 minutes to walk to the LRT station, wait a few minutes for the LRT, and then sit (or most of the time stand actually) for 20 minutes to get out at the station at the foot of the hill of our condominium. After a 15 minute walk uphill I would be sweating in the elevator before I got home. My flat mates got back later than I would, usually around 07:00 pm. When everybody was home we would go out for dinner and have a drink in Bangsar or play some pool. Very often we met some locals during dinner or while having a drink and we made a lot of different friends. For some reason you are very interesting to Malaysian people as you are white. Some of them invited us at their homes for parties, to teach us Mahjong or to come to their own food stalls and tell us all about their cuisine. Great experiences!
In the weekends on Fridays and Saturdays we usually went out to the clubs in Kuala Lumpur. KL has a great clubbing scene with very trendy places. Typical was that we usually were one of the few Western people and that meant a lot of people wanted to get to know us. We’ve been invited to the opening of new clubs, to fashion shows and all sorts of things. Someone even invited us for his wedding, although we just met him a few hours earlier. It’s a nice, but sometimes a little bit awkward situation of constantly being approached by people who want to get to know you just because you are Western. Besides that, people loved to make a picture with you. They were usually bold enough to come up to you and just asked if they could take picture together. One time even, when I was going to the Merdeka celebration with my flatmates, we were photographed very sneaky by some Chinese people in the metro. They saw we saw them doing that and after that they had the guts to ask us to make photo together. Once we did that, all the rest of the people in the metro wanted to do the same! A really crazy situation and we were posing the rest of our trip.
On Saturdays and Sundays we undertook daytrips (see the next section about travelling) or we just hung out at the apartment. I didn’t do any sports in Malaysia, except for the trekkings and the walks uphill to and from the LRT station.
We used to travel to work and around the city either using the public transport or a taxi. Public transport in Malaysia is very well organized. It has trains, busses, a monorail and an LRT (metro) which work very well together. The only problem is that Malaysians do not have the decency to let people out of the trains first before entering. So when people are trying to get out, others are pushing in already and very often people who had to get out did not manage to get out in time. During rush hour there were special public transport officers who would stand at the door and check if everyone who wanted to leave was out before letting other people in. So that was quite a difference from what I was used to with the decent people in the working life.
So all and all, I had a pretty Western life in Kuala Lumpur. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to travel around the country and see so much more than the well developed parts of Malaysia.
Showing posts with label expat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label expat. Show all posts
Sunday, 8 November 2009
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.
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.
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