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  Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Monday, February 5, 2007

Sean here:  We ended up taking a train up the west side of the Malay peninsula from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur.  I'm a sucker for trains and figured it would be amazing making the 1,249 mile trip from Singapore to Bangkok.  I had my heart set on taking a much older jungle train up the east side, with hard wooden seats, no aircon, only third class available, and a painfully slow travel speed.  When I looked it over, I figured it would have taken at least three days just to make it to the Thai border due to schedules issues with switching trains.  Once there, we would have been moving around in an area experiencing a bloody Muslim rebellion by car until we could catch a Thai train going north.  I considered all these facts and that and I rather like being married and don't want that to change soon.  Soooo, we opted for the easy, fast, first class train.  Go figure.

There are some countries I feel like I'm halfway knowledgeable about even I haven't been there.  Malaysia isn't one of those countries.  Half of what I know about Malaysia came from watching a Jackie Chan movie in college and the other half from a brochure I picked up in the Singapore train station that I read as I went through Malaysian customs.  With that in mind, we decided this would be the perfect country to take on without any guide book or previous research.  So far, so good. 

Malaysia seems a bit more developed that the rest of SE Asia and fairly easy to manage.  Malaysia is working on proving itself a true country worth taking seriously and thus has done things such as built the world's tallest buildings (since beaten by Taiwan), amazing public transportation systems, and tons of shopping malls.  Another wonderful thing about Malaysia, is that like Singapore, it uses English as the common language.  While Malay, various forms of Chinese, and Tamil are all spoken by their own ethnic groups, most people speak English competently.  This simplifies things for us dramatically and leads to some interesting conversations.  I'll try to capture a few of these conversations in the future.

One of the first things that surprised by about KL (as everyone calls Kuala Lumpur) and Malaysia is how Islam doesn't dominate.  While it is officially a Muslim country, almost half of the population isn't Malay, but Indian and Chinese.  Like Singapore, Britain actively encourage immigration during the colonial period.  This has certainly mellowed out the country and created a government that respects other religions.  In addition, the strain of Islam here came from relaxed Indian merchants, rather than Arab armies or missionaries.  While it is normal to see women on the subway wearing head scarves, they are likely to have high heels on and be standing next to a Chinese girl in a miniskirt. 

We've had access to a TV in our hotel room for several nights now (woohoo!) and while we don't always understand the language, some things we catch onto.  On the nightly news, there was coverage of what seemed to be a trial of American soldiers for torturing people in Iraq.  This story was followed by a story about what seemed to be a recently opened wax museum recreating the various torture, excuse me, abuse, at Abu Ghraib.  Great.   On our way to Petronas Twin Towers, there were posters hanging from the street lights.  In places like Kansas City, these things are about "First Night Kansas" or "Come Hear the Kansas City Orchestra".  Here, I'm not sure what they were about, but they did have that picture of the guy in Abu Ghraib standing on a box with a bag over his head and wires on all his limbs.  That's what I like people to see on their morning commute to the office.  Needless to say, I opted not to take a picture of this.  It's really hard to capture just how bad this sort of thing hurts America's reputation as the good guys fighting for what's right.  We need the help of moderate countries like Malaysia, but everyone here sees these pictures and sees very little punishment being dispensed.  It concerns me and makes this trip a bit more uncomfortable.  The last thing I want to feel in another country is like a Soviet citizen in 1985 sitting in the middle of New Jersey watching "Rocky IV".  Everyone here has been very polite and not mentioned a thing of this.  I haven't detected a hint of anti-Americanism from anyone, so that's at least a positive thing.

We're headed up to Georgetown on Penang Island soon, and then we'll head off to smaller islands to get a beach cottage and relax for a few days.  We should be back in touch after we clear the Thai border.

Malaysia's Wiki Link

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