What is a coffee license and why doesn't Malaysia have flat sheets?

So the other night, I was hanging out at home watching a rerun of "Glee" and there was this scene where everyone was attending a football game (that's American football) and arrived all bundled up in their fall apparel -- jackets, scarves, and such. And there was, for me, this wave of despair that departed as quickly as it arrived... I miss the changing seasons. Now, I can truly say I don't miss the cold. I don't miss being cold. I don't miss driving in snow. I certainly don't miss shoveling it. But having different seasons -- I think I do miss that.

The next day, I was relaying this, along with some other trifling thing about life in the US, to one of my friends, who responded, "Sounds like you're getting kind of tired of Malaysia." I took this to heart and really mulled it over. While it's true that, after 22 months here, the newness and novelty of life in KL has sort of worn off, I don't know that I'd honestly say that I'm tired of living here. When I was packing up all my stuff back in Denver, one of my primary stated reasons for moving abroad was to experience living life in a different country, out of my comfort zone... that means the good and the bad. And I do have to remind myself of that when I'm confronted with the different (and sometimes backwards) way that things are done here.

Perfect example was just this last week. My office towers are part of a massive mixed-use development here called Mid Valley City. There are two malls (one of them positively huge), two high-rise hotels, eleven high-rise residences and office towers, and no useful public transit to speak of. The LRT station is across a patch of land and a river. The station is literally in the middle of nowhere. Even though they have their very own flashy website complete with animation and funky theme music, there's no denying that Midvalley is really just a hot mess and, before getting a job with a company whose office was there, I actually made it a point to stay away from the whole area. You'll note that the website doesn't show any photos of the massive traffic jams that terrorize the place for half the day, every day, or the sad video feed of someone trying for an hour to find a parking place at 2:30 in the afternoon. (This happened to one of my colleagues, and we've had clients just give up and leave after spending 30-60 minutes fruitlessly searching for a place to park.) Mid Valley really is a victim of its own success.

So anyway, this place has about 11,000 parking spaces in the multiple parking garages, but for some demented reason, the management there decided to have a major fire drill at exactly 9 a.m. on Tuesday. Now this is the time that about 90% of everyone arrives at work, and with them closing the parking areas off for 45 minutes for their fire drill, you can imagine the effects. Why on earth have a fire drill at that time? It's deranged. Obviously you're not working on any evacuation procedures since the offices aren't filled and the malls aren't even open. If you want it like that, then do the drill at 7 a.m., not right when everyone is arriving. The traffic was backed up horribly -- all out onto the highways feeding into the ring road around the malls. This is just par for the course for Malaysia, though. With some things, I just attribute it to being different -- not necessarily better or worse. This, however, was just stupid. The ring road around Midvalley clearly, CLEARLY doesn't work in general -- it may have been a good plan in theory, but for whatever reason, it wasn't executed properly and the traffic there is awful at almost any time -- it can, at times, take me longer just to get clear of the ring road when I leave work than it does to actually drive home once I've cleared it. But I can assure everyone nothing will be done about this. There will be no traffic flow analysis, there will be no restructuring of the side roads and access paths, there will be no improvement in the mess that is Midvalley. I've been told that the philosophy here is "tolerate or avoid." And that definitely does seem to be true.

Other things are far less irritating and usually fall more under the "hmm, well that's odd" category. For example, motorbikes are everywhere here (thought not nearly as prolific as they are in Indonesia). That in itself is not very strange, but the riders here have a very strange habit of wearing their jackets backwards (back to front). I figure there's some reason for it, but it sure is bizarre.
Now take a look at these two photos. This is another strange thing here. This entire elevated roadway that you see is nothing but a giant, lame U-turn. That's it. Millions were spent constructing this thing -- it has full ramps, pillars, signage, light posts... everything but its own line of perfume. And it serves absolutely NO purpose except being a U-turn on a road. I've seen several of these throughout the city. This really highlights how poorly the road system is planned and executed.






Now, the roads themselves are bad enough, but I think after all the driving I've done here, I've landed on one of the key problems: Traffic control. For whatever reason, many traffic lights here just go on forever. The light will stay red for literally 3-4 minutes at many interchanges, then when it turns green, it's just as long. So during its long red cycle, a huge amount of traffic backs up (oftentimes spilling onto adjacent streets), and when it turns green and stays green for so long, this mechanism that's actually designed to control traffic flow just allows a torrent of vehicles onto a road that really isn't able to handle the capacity. So just timing the lights so there's a much shorter green/red cycle would be immensely helpful.

So for all the traffic problems, the one big x-factor is the drivers in KL. I was with a friend of mine some time ago and just ranting about the idiocy of people driving here -- I mean, it's awful. They don't use signals, they drift in and out of lanes, sometimes they'll just straddle a lane divider for awhile, then drift back into a proper lane, they jump the queues of cars at every opportunity, you see guys on motorbikes texting on their phones (on motorbikes!!)... it's just a mad free-for-all much of the time. And my comment was along the lines of, "Do these people just get their driver's licences out of gumball machines!?!" And the reply I got was something about coffee licenses... so I had to get more information. And after talking to no fewer than four people here, all of whom knew exactly what this referred to, here's what I came up with: In Malaysia, any license that would normally need to be acquired through a strict set of controlled processes, or passing a test, or demonstrating a degree of competency, can be otherwise obtained with an "under the table" payment. Apparently at one point, the going price was a nice cup of coffee, but nowadays the price for not having to bother with all the headache of an actual road test to get one's license is in the RM100-200 range. No wonder so many people here can't drive worth a flip!! They just pay off the examiner, get their "provisional license" sticker for their car, and off they go, thrown into the deep end where they learn by trial and error, duplicating the ways and means of the many other awful drivers here.

Now, for the Malaysians here who have actually learned to drive and done things properly and passed their written and road tests, I salute you. I would like to even believe that this is the case with a majority of drivers here. A whole lot of time spent on the roadways of Malaysia, however, suggests otherwise. (Honest disclosure: Road tests in the US aren't something you can bribe your way out of, but the test is laughably easy in most states. A ten-minute drive, maybe some parking maneuvers, and you're good to go. European countries are much more stringent with the issuance of driver's licenses.)

On a lighter note, one of the earliest things I noticed about living here was the lack of a flat, or top, sheet on the beds. The standard bed here is dressed with a fitted sheet, then a comforter. There's also a bolster pillow, which is not part of the normal bed in America. I really enjoy the bolster pillow part, and the lack of a flat sheet doesn't bother me, but it is confusing. In a hot climate such as Malaysia's, just sleeping under a thin, flat sheet would be great. I could just use the fan in my bedroom. As it is now, though, if I want to sleep under something, it has to be my comforter, so I wind up needing to set the air conditioner at 23°C. It's baffling. So the standard "bed in a bag" set here consists of one fitted sheet, one comforter, two pillow shams, occasionally (but not typically) two regular pillowcases, and one bolster pillowcase.

There's also the matter of the beds here being smaller than those in the US, but that's not surprising. Most people here are smaller. However, my particular bed here, which is supposedly a queen size bed, is exactly 75 inches long. I measured a friend's queen size bed, and it was 78 inches long, which is standard in the UK (in the US, standard queen beds are 80" long). So why is my bed only 75 inches? Where did my extra three inches go?? I'm 183cm/72 inches tall, so on the 75-inch bed, so my toes hang off the end a little (since my head isn't all the way up at the very edge of the bed). Losing those three inches makes a real difference. Weird.

Here's one difference I really like, and readers in America will wonder why it's not done there, too: You can select your seats at the movie theater when you buy your tickets, even a couple of days in advance. No more queuing up for three hours on opening night so you can even have a shot at getting a decent seat. Indonesian theaters have "assigned seat" cinemas , too. Not sure why the US doesn't adopt such a system.

Anyway, apologies for not only the epic lag time between this entry and the last one, but also for the general lack of photos here. I just wanted to get an entry posted because there's a lot more to write about and those entries WILL have photos, and will be a bit more positive in tone, I'm sure!

It's Just Not Right

You know, I'm all about embracing cultural diversity and even fine with adapting things to fit the local scene. I've learned to live with, if not actually embrace, chicken ham and beef pepperoni. But there is a line beyond which it all just descends into abject lunacy.

Look at this thing. It's somehow called a pizza, and indeed, even served by the Malaysian version of Pizza Hut. But really... at what point do you just dispense with the traditional, familiar nomenclature and make up a new name for your creation? Just because it's flat and round doesn't mean it's a pizza.

I saw a commercial for this "Fish-Prawn King Pizza" on TV the other night and felt like I had slipped into an alternate reality. I've seen some pretty weird things offered up by the local Pizza Huts around here, but this one surely soars to the top of the list.

This culinary horror is made of tempura-fried shrimp, fried fish sticks, pineapple, and I guess there may or may not be some cheese used. Oh... yes, it specifies mozzarella cheese. Add some red bell peppers and some fake "crab sticks," lather them all up in a lime-mayonnaise dressing, and pile them on a crust and bake. Then garnish with lemons. The mind just boggles. And the stomach just heaves. Honestly, you can see why I don't go to Pizza Hut here, even though, as the ad insists, it's "SO WORTH IT!" At least it's an equal-opportunity offender, I guess. This faux pizza, in one go, manages to eviscerate the noble culinary efforts of, at a minimum, Italy, Japan, and Hawaii.

The ad is unintentionally funny, too... "Now you can get all the succulent prawns you want!" it proclaims. So, I guess before this promotion hit the market, there were succulent prawn limits. However, it goes on to say that the pizza comes with a whopping grand total of precisely four (4) of the aforementioned succulent prawns. And that's only if you buy the large. So, provided you're able to count higher than four, you really can't get all the succulent prawns you want, after all. Unless you just buy lots of these Fish Stick Shrimp and Pineapple Pizza Discs which you know look nothing in actual fact like they do in the photo, which somehow manages to make it look very nearly appealing. The wonders of commercial food photography.

In all fairness, this gastronomic explosion may actually taste okay... although I certainly wouldn't bet any money on it. And looking at some of the things American pizzerias have churned out definitely shows that this sort of experimentation isn't unique to Malaysia (witness the BBQ cheeseburger pizza and the taco pizza). This one, though -- I don't know. Is it the lime-mayonnaise dressing? Is it the humble fish stick being deified as if it's some culinary marvel? ("Specially-imported Alaskan pollock fish fingers!" -- It's a cheap frozen fish stick!! Get over it!) Is it the overturned bucket of beady-eyed dead shrimp littered across the table in the ad? Is it the kitschy little crown placed ever-so-cutely on the K in "KING"? Is it the ad's preposterous exhortation that four of anything somehow constitutes an "abundance"? Am I missing something? Is it me?

To quote everyone's newest life coach, Glee's Sue Sylvester, "Of course it's not me."

Ladies and gentlemen, the Fish-Prawn King Lime-Mayonnaise Pineapple Pizza. This is just one of a host of oddities and idiosyncracies I've noticed while living here. Every place has 'em. The next entry will detail some of Malaysia's.

Of Sommeliers, Singapore, and Slip-ons

So there I was, just browsing the Internet one day last October when I randomly stumbled on a job listing for a regional director position with a multinational wine investment company that was looking to expand its operations into Malaysia. Though I wasn't at all looking for a job, after reading the job description and qualification requirements, it sounded tailor-made for me, so I sent in my résumé. To make a long story short, something I almost never do here, after a lengthy process involving multiple interviews and written assessments, I was offered, on November 30, an even higher position within the company. The offer, coupled with the fact that the job wouldn't begin until January, is what prompted me to book my flight home for Christmas, which I had not initially planned to do because of the cost.

In any event, after a few discussions, the company decided to make my job title "executive director" and I indeed took up the post in mid-January, going to Singapore for two weeks for orientation and, as I found, really to just be thrown into the deep end. Fortunately, that's just the way I like it. Though I'm not at all a sommelier in the traditional sense, this job will let me put my wine knowledge and my passion for fine wine to good use. (I can add now, upon finally posting this write-up, I've been on the job for nearly four months and have been made head of Malaysia operations in addition to my executive director duties... quite a change from teaching English in a little learning center this time last year!)

So my journey south back in late January wasn't my first time to Singapore, but it was my first time to visit there as something besides a very short-term tourist (I think the longest I had stayed previously had been three days), so I thought I'd have the chance to explore and get to know the city more. As it turned out, I was so preoccupied with work (and after-work socializing with my new colleagues), that there wasn't much time to play tourist. However, one of my good friends from KL took the train down during my first weekend, and we met one of my other friends who had just recently moved from KL to Singapore so we had a really good time that weekend wandering around. The weather couldn't have been any better. It was sunny, clear, and hot. Singapore is a beautiful city and at only 1° north of the equator, it's understandably a near-explosion of green: lush, tropical foliage abounds everywhere and the city-state has done a remarkable job of preserving the trees and plants amidst all the shiny glass skyscrapers and the concrete jungle. This building here is the School of the Arts and it's truly a fantastic edifice from an architectural standpoint. The city has no shortage of impressive buildings.

Singapore gets a somewhat deserved bad rap for being a "nanny state" and implementing an almost social-engineering degree of control over its population, but in exchange for the citizens' abdication of some of their personal rights, Singapore enjoys a standard of living unprecedented in any country in the tropics. And it's awash in money, too -- indeed, Singapore's "purchasing power" wealth per capita is, depending on the source, in the top three or four in the world... several notches ahead of America's. It far and away sets the quality of life standard in the region and as close as it is to KL geographically, it could scarcely be more different. Everything is organized and efficient to the point of disbelief. Their MRT trains run on time, with great frequency, the train lines cover almost every point of the small island, and the stations are famous for their scrupulous cleanliness. Crime, particularly violent crime, is all but non-existent. The network of underground passages is mind-boggling: A shopper can, by way of vast underground store-lined walkways and MRT stations and lines, visit a weekend's worth of malls without ever being exposed to the sun.

Of course, like most things in life, this degree of wealth and efficiency comes with a trade-off. Singapore is one of the most expensive places in Asia to live, there's a certain sterility present everywhere, and the degree of government control is well-known, though it appears to be easing, if only slightly. In an effort to capture more tourist dollars, the city-state has permitted two casinos to be built. One, pictured here behind Singapore's iconic symbol, the "Merlion," is the Marina Bay Sands, owned by the Las Vegas-based Sands corporation. It's three 55-story towers, topped by a cantilevered "Sky Park" with gardens, a pool, and restaurants. Seeing it in person was amazing. The side of the towers that you can't see in the photos is even more impressive as they each bulge gracefully outward and to different extents (based on feng shui guidance) at their bases. It's a very impressive and ambitious project, all set to open (at least partially) at the end of April. The other casino is on the island of Sentosa, immediately south of Singapore's main island. It's owned by Malaysia's Genting Group and opened last month. Having casinos in Singapore at all is a huge deal, but to stem the tide of any social ills that may befall its population, the government is levying a steep entry fee for locals -- S$100 per visit. The idea is that it's supposed to discourage locals from the evils of gambling, yet still invite tourists to come and lose their money. So any local gambler will be "down" a hundred bucks by the time he first sits down at a table to play. Interesting concept, just one quite foreign to my American brain where charging one group of people for entry to a legal, legitimate business while admitting another group free of charge would never even be considered, let alone allowed.

We also found a wonderful dim sum restaurant... short on ambiance, but long on deliciousness. It's called Victor's Kitchen, it's at Sunshine Plaza, and two people can eat a pretty substantial amount of dim sum there for about S$20-25. I ate there twice and loved it both times. Their siew mai and fried prawn salad dumplings were fantastic and I definitely plan to return there on my next visit.

I stayed in a furnished condo near the Little India neighborhood of Singapore, right next to the Farrer Park MRT station and a new eco-mall called City Square. Getting to and from the office was easy and cheap on the trains. The condo, called City Square Residences, was brand new. It was small, clean, efficient... a microcosm of Singapore itself, really. The condo itself, a studio unit with a "bedroom" partitioned off by opaque sliding glass panels, was only about 600 square feet, yet had four air-conditioning units installed, so there was no chance of me ever getting hot, that's for sure. Everything was new, not just the condo -- I spent most of the first evening there unboxing things, unpackaging sheets and pillows, peeling shipping tape off of everything from the refrigerator to the flat-screen TV. Then I had to run over to the adjacent mall and buy some towels because I didn't have any. It was an interesting experience staying in an actual residence rather than a hotel or long-stay hotel/apartment.

Singapore is a relatively short distance from KL, particularly by Asian standards, where anything within a 4-to-5 hour flight is considered "nearby." It's about a one-hour flight, but with all of the headaches involved with traveling by air, and in light of KL's airport being an hour away from the city to begin with, I elected to take the bus, an executive double-decker coach with very nice seats, full meal service, personal TVs, and no airport security hassles or restrictions. The bus also picks up very near my condo in KL and I can park for any length of time for only RM1, so it really is a no-brainer. It's an easy, comfortable 4.5-hour trip down the peninsula and across the causeway into Singapore. One of the coach lines even has free Wi-Fi on its buses! Here's a nice shot of the sunset over the strait separating Singapore from Malaysia on the return journey.

And what's the slip-ons part about? Well, here in Asia, removing one's shoes at the door is almost universally common, so for me, taking my dress shoes off was always a pain, since I had to unlace them, loosen them, and pry them off. So last month, I bought my first-ever pair of dress shoes that can just be slipped on and off, a nice brown leather pair of traditional Oxford-style shoes, just sans laces! Such shoes are obviously incredibly common here -- I was recently waiting in line at the post office and there were 14 people waiting with me, 13 of whom had on slip-on shoes of some sort or another. Laced shoes are simply not common in a place where you have to take your shoes off and put them back on several times a day!

So I'm going to finally get this entry posted -- I wrote it weeks ago but have just neglected to arrange the photos and post the thing. I'll write another one soon about the past six weeks or so of my crazy life in Malaysia.

Cameron Highlands Resort

When the British were running roughshod over the Malay peninsula back in first half of the 20th century, they found a few high-elevation bastions of relief from the heat and humidity of the lowlands. The highest of these was called Cameron Highlands. To the delight of the colonial overlords, they discovered that not only could they cool off, but also that tea grew exceptionally well at 1,500 meters above sea level. This was no doubt a welcome discovery because really, there’s no better way to end a hard day of colonizing and plundering than to have a civilized spot of tea.

Today, Cameron Highlands remains a welcome relief from KL’s heat and urban chaos. Reaching the hill stations of the Highlands takes about three hours, but over half of that is on a tortuously winding road that creeps along for 60 km. Sixty!! I don’t think I ever made it past third gear. Look at the route on the GPS. That’s not a misrepresentation. I’m from Colorado, so I’ve seen some twisty mountain roads, but this one was just crazy. The good thing, I suppose, is that the elevation gain is done over such a long distance, you’re really not aware of it until you realize that, hey, that air conditioner really isn’t necessary any longer.

Early along the winding road, not too far past the town of Tapah, there was a breathtaking multi-tiered waterfall called Lata Iskandar. The pictures really don’t do it justice… plenty of people were wandering around, some were swimming in the clear waters pooled at the base of the each of the fall’s cascades, and naturally, plenty of little shops have sprung up alongside the road, making it sort of an ad-hoc tourist attraction of sorts. We lingered for a short while, then continued on our way.

Cameron Highlands comprises three small villages, Ringlet, Tanah Rata, and Brinchang. We stayed at the elegant Cameron Highlands Resort, which is situated across from the golf course past Tanah Rata, but not yet to Brinchang. The entrance was suitably impressive… dark woods, period furnishings, and colonial touches everywhere. The library near the reception desk was particularly beautiful. The room itself was really quite nice, with a separate sitting area, a writing desk, a large flat-screen TV (not a flat-panel LCD, just a flat screen standard TV), dark hardwood floors, and a very fancy, well-appointed bathroom that was quite the opposite of the gargantuan one at Pangkor Laut based just on the size. This one could have used a few more square feet, but the shower was at least suitably large.

I’m not sure what the legal definition of a “resort” is, but this place felt an awful lot like just a nice hotel to me. I think there was a spa somewhere, but I’m not 100% sure. There was one restaurant (another Japanese-themed one was closed the whole time), a bar, a gift shop, and that was pretty much all. It was all fairly upscale, but the exterior entryways to the rooms lent a sort of “motel” feel to things, and I can only echo the number one complaint I saw on all the reviews of the place: Since the hotel is situated right on the main road and every room faces this road, the traffic noise is incredible. It would carry on late into the night, usually until well past midnight, and was easily the biggest blight on the hotel as a whole. For a supposed 5-star property, subjecting guests who paid a lot of money to stay there to that level of ceaseless noise is just unacceptable. Nobody asked me for my advice, but if they had, I’d have suggested investing in white noise-generating machines for each room (there aren’t that many rooms there), or even sampling the typical frequencies of the traffic noise, then having a machine in each room that could generate the inverse sound waves of those frequencies, just like active noise-cancelling headphones. It would be much cheaper than retrofitting all the windows with double-pane or sound-resistant glass, and much more practical than relocating the entire hotel. The constant drone of cars, trucks, and motorbikes at all hours of the day and night was really the only major complaint I could come up with. The restaurant was on the pricey side, but unlike Pangkor Laut, at least guests here have the option of going into town, where there are many other dining choices. That said, the chef at the hotel restaurant did prepare a truly fantastic four-course meal for us on our last night, and it was all complimentary because he knew my friend Ryan. The first course, and possibly my favoite, was a nontraditional Caesar-style salad (pictured here), adding crispy flash-fried spinach leaves to the normal romaine lettuce with massive grilled tiger prawns and fresh dill, a rich lobster bisque for the soup course, a delicious "surf-n-turf" sort of main course with Australian beef tenderloin medallions and pan-seared Chilean sea bass, and dessert of jumbo long-stemmed strawberries with three different dips. It was a fantastic meal made even better by the fact it was all served gratis. What a treat!

Naturally, we toured a huge tea plantation and a strawberry farm after that. I had never seen actual tea plants (tea bushes?) but the way they hug the contours of the land, oftentimes all the way to the top of the hills, just makes for some amazingly scenic vistas. I bought fresh strawberries and we drank so much tea over the weekend there, I may have gone slightly British by the end. One new thing I learned was that green tea and black tea are the same thing, just processed differently. Green tea is dried with minimal processing, pretty much just as it is when it is plucked from the bush, but black tea is made by bruising the leaves and allowing them to fully oxidize, thus turning black, before drying them. Going through the tea factory was an interesting experience, and it smelled wonderful.

One really vexing thing was the exorbitant price of scones everywhere we went. Clearly driven by the tourist demand for “English tea and scones,” shops have taken to charging a mint for the scones, completely overlooking the fact that they’re just simple biscuits. We went to one place where tea and scones for two was an eye-popping RM25 per person! Another annoyance was places advertising “high tea” and serving nothing but tea and biscuits. That’s not high tea by either traditional British convention, which would include meats, savory snacks, pastries, and fruits, or the more commercialized American usage, which indicates a formal setting with a wide-ranging offering of sandwiches, cakes, etc. Nevertheless, we did find a place with a reasonably priced afternoon phony high tea. It was at a new place called Hotel de la Ferns, and afterwards, we asked if we could see the rooms, and wound up being taken on a tour of every class of room on the property, even seeing both of the top-floor penthouse suites, shown here. Wow. The rooms were amazing, really smartly furnished, clean, and comfortable. During the low season, discounts of up to 40% off the rack rate are available for the asking. I will definitely stay there on my next visit (since I won’t be getting the amazing employee-only rate at Cameron Highlands Resort).

All in all, it was just a truly enjoyable and relaxing time in the hills of Cameron Highlands. I even found what proved to be a really nice Late Harvest 2004 Chilean Gewürztraminer wine at one of the shops there for the relatively low price of RM52 (not a bad price in Malaysia for a decent bottle of regular wine, let alone a late harvest wine), so I bought three bottles.

So that concludes my recap and review of the two fantastic vacations that sandwiched my trip home for Christmas. I’ve led a rather spoiled life these past two months with all the travel and commencement of a terrific new job, which I’ll talk about in the next entry, along with a two-week trip to Singapore and the celebration of Chinese New Year on the island of Langkawi. So there's still a lot to catch up on. Until then… :)

Pangkor Laut Resort

It’s all about who you know. It’s true in America and it’s even more true in Asia. I’ve been pretty fortunate in my time here to have met some great people. One of my friends works for a company that, among other things, owns a few resort properties in the region. This worked out well for me because we were able to go to two very swanky resorts for a fraction of their regular rates. I thought it would be interesting to write the next two blog entries as sort of my reviews of the resorts along with my recollections. I want to write them, however, from the perspective of a full-paying guest. It’s easy to be forgiving when you’re getting 90-95% off rack rates. But if you’re paying the going rates, you tend to notice things a bit more.

First up... Pangkor Laut Resort

Probably the crown jewel of the YTL properties, Pangkor Laut is a 300-acre private island off the west coast of peninsular Malaysia, about midway between KL and Penang. It’s just south of the larger, publicly accessible Pangkor Island, itself a popular vacation spot for Malaysians. So we drove to the port town of Lumut, dropped our luggage at the Pangkor Laut Resort office and boarded our speedboat to the island. In retrospect, this was a major point of irritation – for guests paying exorbitant rates (indeed, the villa we stayed in has a regular rate of US$575), the resort still levies a RM70 per person (each way) charge for the boat ride to the island. You’d think it would be part of the package deal. But no. So we arrived at the island, and in all truth, it was very impressive. The water was clear and blue-green, the welcome was polished (a drink and a cool towel), and our luggage was whisked away to the villa while we checked in. The weather couldn’t have been much better. Pangkor Laut really is a beautiful island and the resort is integrated into the beach and rainforest setting very well.

The sea villa was pretty amazing, but I thought a bit too much of the space was given to the bathroom (it was enormous) at the expense of the bedroom/living space. It was really nice, though. There was a nice deck with sun loungers, a CD player, an iPod stereo dock, a writing desk, plenty of closet space, a mini-fridge, a huge spa tub that opened up on three sides to the sea, and a lot of privacy, which I guess is a big part of what people who come here are paying for.

We saw a fair few animals, but the most prolific were meter-long monitor lizards, huge fruit bats by the hundreds, and hornbills. I had never seen a hornbill in the wild before, so that was a bit of a treat for me. The bats would congregate en masse in a few coconut palms near the main swimming pool each day, sleeping fitfully as they hung upside down. With the last vestiges of daylight, the trees emptied and the bats set out on their nightly hunt. It was interesting, but I’m glad the bats weren’t near our villa… they were awfully noisy (and messy) during their daytime resting hours.

One of the repeated complaints I saw in travelers’ reviews of the resort was the extremely high cost of meals. Since you are effectively a captive diner, the island’s restaurants have no motivation to offer any low-priced alternatives. Most meals cost two to three times what they would cost in an expensive Western restaurant in KL. For example, a burger at TGI Friday’s or Chili’s in KL will run about RM25. At a beachside restaurant on Pangkor Laut, a burger is RM50 plus service charge and tax. A nice dinner for two people (one appetizer, two entrées, one midpriced bottle of wine, and a dessert) could easily run into the RM600-900 range. Happily, my connections to the staff got me passage on the staff boat to Pangkor Island (about a ten-minute crossing, if that), where we enjoyed a huge meal for four people, complete with beers and more dishes than we could finish, for under RM90.

The next day, a group of us went back to Pangkor to hit the markets for fresh food. One of the ladies, Annie, had decided to cook an authentic Filipino meal for us that night, so we got a whole chicken cut up, prawns from one of the many little seafood markets, and some great pork. Annie made a wonderful yellow Filipino curry with the chicken, which was my favorite. We also had a big pot of steamed rice, a bowlful of prawns cooked in a mild, tasty broth, and pork cooked rendang-style, a process that first cooks the meat in a liquid, then fries it in the rendered fats and solids once the liquid cooks off. It was all so delicious, and Annie even gave me a container of the wonderful yellow curry powder from the Philippines—and asked me to bring her back a jar of Peter Pan creamy peanut butter from America (which I did).

The resort had a couple of really nice spots... there was a library of sorts with lots of ceiling fans and open-air high ceilings. There were these bed-like places, kind of high off the ground, so you could slip off your shoes, climb the few stairs to the mattress and curl up with a book in the cool air. It was really nice. There was also a great pool right near our sea villas. This shot was taken from the lounge chairs near the pool, so you can see the "infinity edge" that separates the deep blue of the pool from the less-intense blue of the sea. We spent a fair amount of time here, sipping on drinks and feeling completely spoiled, which I guess is the whole point of a place such as Pangkor Laut.

Being a guest of the staff had other perks, too, like getting to know a lot of the behind-the-scenes things about making a unique resort like this work. One night, I sat with two of the managers—one from Australia and one from the US—and had coffee and listened to their tales of island living. The island generates its own power, but has fresh water piped over from the mainland (or at least the main island). They have a large tank on the far side of Pangkor Laut that holds enough water for three days for the resort at near-full occupancy in the event of a break in the main water pipe. Another kind of cool factoid is that they round up any snakes they come across and relocate them to an even smaller island in the straits between Pangkor and Pangkor Laut (seen here on the left side of the photo). In the interim, the snakes are housed in little plastic containers. This one holds a viper of some sort and a nonpoisonous tree snake. Like most people, I’m not a huge fan of snakes, but I thought this was a very admirable alternative to just killing them.

Honestly, the whole trip to Pangkor Laut, though short (3 full days and 2 nights), was really very memorable. I got a little sunburned, but not too bad, and it was all just such a terrific experience for me. I can’t say it would necessarily have been worth the full price, had we paid that, and the additional RM280 boat charge really rubbed me the wrong way, but there is a package for Malaysian residents that offers a two-night package, complete with boat transfers and meals (very important), for around RM800 per person total, and that’s a great deal. It’s not for a sea villa like we had, but it still gets you a very nice (and larger) hill villa or garden villa. I couldn’t honestly recommend Pangkor Laut at the full rack rate, but at the package deal price, it would be well worth it.

So I’m sure I left out some things, but I have to cap these entries at some length. This last shot is of my friends Annie and Ryan, just as Ryan and I were about to get on the boat back to the mainland. It was a great holiday and the beginning of a shamelessly enjoyable five-week period in my life. I took off most of the month of December and the first week of January, started off with a vacation to a private tropical island, followed by a trip back to Colorado for Christmas and New Year’s. Upon returning to Malaysia, once I recovered a bit from the journey, it was off to Cameron Highlands for a few days of tea, strawberries, and markedly cooler temperatures! To be continued...

Home for the Holidays... Courtesy of China Southern Airlines

Note: The Christmas tree pictured here is from my house three years ago. I was hosting Christmas Day dinner that year, and, as I truly hate wrapping gifts, had naturally put it off until the last possible minute. I had set up the tree, but hadn’t put any decorations or lights on it as of Christmas Eve. Nothing like procrastination to spice up the holiday season! So one of my friends came over with his gifts and we proceeded to do our gift-wrapping together. We also drank. You know, wrap a gift, take a shot, something like that. So by the time we finished wrapping, we were pretty liquored up and it was nearing midnight. I couldn’t be bothered with actually decorating the tree at that point, so I just stuck unopened boxes of ornaments and lights, rolls of wrapping paper, and other holiday paraphernalia into the boughs of the tree (click to enlarge). Everyone loved it the next day and it became an instant classic. We still talk about it and likely will for years to come.

Happy 2010! I’m writing this while on a 777 flying back to KL now, currently early into the longest leg of the trip. This is actually officially the longest nonstop flight I’ve taken: 15 hours aloft. I looked it up, thinking this was surely one of the longest commercial flights, only to find out it’s not even in the top thirty. Whatever, though… 15 hours is plenty long enough for me. To compound the misery, I flew out from what has to be the worst major airport in America, LAX. They’re doing a years-long (and decades-overdue) renovation on the terminal, but I’ve flown in and out of LAX many times, and it’s not just an embarrassment to Los Angeles, it’s a stain on American aviation. Security was a complete nightmare, naturally, and a four-hour layover was only barely sufficient to go through the ordeal. But it gets worse… I’m flying the largest airline you’ve never heard of (China Southern) to the largest city you’ve also never heard of (Guangzhou, China). Neither of these bodes well for me. Our dinner was a complete travesty. I’m not even that picky when it comes to airline food, and this was easily one of the crappiest meals I’ve ever had in the sky. I, like both of my seatmates, couldn’t even bother finishing it. But hey, on the good side, only 13.5 hours left to go (sigh). But I can’t even get excited about that because I have a 12.5-hour layover in Guangzhou, and if it’s anything like the 8-hour festival of despair on the outbound flight, I may have to self-medicate during my time in the airport. I can’t update my blog while there because, like YouTube, the blogger.com website is banned in China. After that, it’s a relatively short four-hour flight back to KL, where I’ll arrive late in the evening, almost certainly not returning to my condo until 1 a.m. I can’t say that I’ll never fly China Southern again, but for myriad reasons, they will never sit atop my list of preferred airlines, and I’ll almost certainly not fly them across the Pacific again.

One incredibly retarded thing that they do is fail to issue boarding passes for both legs of the journey, even though they’re on the same airline. For example, when I checked in for the flight in LA, I was given a boarding pass for the LA-Guangzhou leg, but not for the Guangzhou to KL part. “You can get that in Guangzhou,” they said. It was the same on the outbound flight. Moreover, you actually have to clear immigration as a transit-only passenger on flights through mainland China. Nobody else does this – I’ve transited through five or six other countries; you don’t deal with immigration at all since you never leave the transit area of the airport. So when I arrived at the podium with my passport, it went something like this:

“Where is your visa to enter China?”

“I don’t have a visa. I’m not entering China. I’m just a transit passenger.”

“Where is your ticket?”

“I don’t have one. It’s an e-ticket.”

“Boarding pass, please.”

“Don’t have that, either. The airline said to get it here.”

“Wait.” Another officer is then summoned and an exchange in Cantonese ensues.

“Where is your boarding pass?” the second officer asks me.

“I still don’t have one.”

So they then took my passport (along with those of the other transit passengers) and disappeared for about half an hour, then a China Southern representative appeared and auctioned off the passports to their respective owners, along with boarding passes. (I already had a confirmed seat on the second leg of the trip, which makes China Southern’s inability to issue a boarding pass in Los Angeles all the more vexing.) Then the representative escorted me through a back-alley way to the boarding gate wing, which has virtually nothing on it save two sad, sad little noodle cafés and a couple of trinket shops. And there I was dumped to wait for twelve hours.

So, after sitting in Guangzhou’s crappy airport for the longest layover I’ve ever had, I’m on the plane now waiting to fly down to KL. I’m surprisingly not very fussed about the odyssey that getting from Denver to even this point has been (to say nothing of the potential hassle once I arrive in KL), but that’s largely because I just mentally shut down at the beginning. It’s really the only way you can maintain your sanity on such a long journey with all the myriad security theatrics, long queues for everything, talkative seatmates, uncomfortable seats, etc. For me, the past 30-something hours are all just a blur. We’re supposedly going to be taking off here in about 15 minutes, and it’s a bit over three hours to KL, so I’ll sign off here and pick this up with a recap of my time in Colorado once I recover from the voyage. But here’s a picture of what I’ve basically been looking at for hours on end. It’s a nice enough airport as far as design and construction, but there are no amenities at all. Just anguish.

* * * * *

Later… So this trip home was much more enjoyable overall than the last one, which included a lot of stress and business dealings. The only real drawback for the whole visit was the cold! Over a year in the tropics has made me even more cold-natured than I already was. When I arrived at the airport, it was -12°C (10°F) and snowing and the temperature never exceeded 3-4°C (37-39°F) for the duration of my visit. This picture here is from my house looking up the snow-covered street in my neighborhood. Though driving on the snow is not fun, it really was kind of nice to have snow for Christmas. One of my friends back in KL remarked that he envisioned me sitting around the Christmas tree with friends and family, with a fire in the fireplace and snow outside… then he said, “Or maybe I’ve just watched too many TV shows.” But actually, that’s pretty much how it was this year! We had Christmas at my mom’s place, and had a really nice fire going while we opened gifts around the tree. We were also treated by my mom to a sumptuous Christmas Day Champagne brunch at the Brown Palace Hotel in downtown Denver. We’ve been there many times before for their excellent Sunday brunch, but this was a first for Christmas, and it didn’t disappoint. Interestingly, the only person I’m actually related to in this picture is my mother, standing next to me. The rest are our good friends of many years and I’ve come to realize that enduring friendships such as these are the very best kind... they are family that you actually get to choose.

The rest of the trip was mostly just eating, shopping, and visiting with my friends. I also got to go to my mother’s new workplace and meet her colleagues. It’s called the Consortium for Older Adult Wellness, a non-profit advocacy organization that helps older people take control of their health care management and their lives in general. They do really good work, and my mom had just been raving about the quality of the people with whom she worked, so it was fun to meet them. At my mother's request, I cooked an appropriately Asian meal for them (Indonesian, however, not Malaysian), and we had a nice post-Christmas lunch at their office.

For really the first time since moving to KL sixteen months ago, I actually miss some things about my home country. My like and dislike of living in Malaysia is subject to predictable ebbs and flows… when I’m sitting in a hellish traffic jam, for instance, living in KL loses almost all of its luster. Driving around Denver in the late evening (on snow, mind you), I was struck at how relatively empty the streets were. Even on fairly major thoroughfares, late at night, there were very few cars keeping me company. In KL, you are almost never alone when you drive. Anywhere, anytime, your car will be only one of many on the road. One thing I don’t miss about Colorado is the long, cold winters. Now, in fairness, winters in Denver are not what any northern-latitudes dweller would characterize as “bad” — indeed, there are plenty of sunny, mild days, and Denver doesn’t actually get a lot of snow. But this December was cold… and although snow that falls in March melts very quickly, snow that falls in mid-December tends to stick around for awhile, particularly when it’s accompanied by a lengthy cold spell. It was nice to get back to the tropical warmth of KL. As I put the finishing touches on this entry, it’s midafternoon and absolutely pouring rain outside. My friends here in KL can’t quite grasp why I like the rain so much; I’ve always been fond of inclement weather in general, but having lived in a very dry climate for so long (Denver gets very little rain during the warm months), I am as enthralled by tropical downpours as Malaysians would be by a snowstorm!

I didn’t take many photos on my trip, sorry for that, but here’s one of just some of the stuff I brought back with me… I filled my two checked bags to the absolute weight limit (23 kg/50 lbs. each), had a carry-on bag that was way, way overweight (about 18 kg./40 lbs.) – glad no one asked me to put it on a scale. And even a backpack that was about 9 kg./20 lbs. So this picture doesn’t include all the contents of my luggage, but it’s a lot of it. Of course, lots of food and food-related things… six or seven new dress shirts, things for my friends here, new shoes, all kinds of stuff.

That's all for now! Coming soon… my recaps and reviews of my trips to Pangkor Laut Resort and Cameron Highlands Resort! Stay tuned…

All Hail the Mighty Ramly Burger

It seems that there's typically either so little of note going on in my life that there's no reason to update the blog, or there's so much going on that there's no time to do so. The middle ground continues to elude me. :)

The past six or seven weeks have comprised both of these extremes. My life has seemed like a baseball game... long stretches of routine and boredom punctuated by moments of high drama, tension, and excitement. While this formula works really well for baseball (and it's not too bad for life in general, either, I suppose), it really doesn't lend itself very favorably to consistent blog writing! But now I can take a breath and get everyone caught up on the last month or so...

First of all, let's talk about food. Somehow, this very popular street food here managed to fly under my radar for the better part of fifteen months, and I just don't know how that happened. It's so popular, in fact, that the primary ingredient is routinely smuggled into Singapore from Malaysia to surreptitiously serve the hungry people there. It's called the Ramly burger, and my research suggests that it's been around since about 1979, created here in KL by a man named Ramly Moknin. Someone gave me a year-old copy of Expatriate Lifestyle magazine and there was an article in there about these burgers, and all I could think is, "How disgusting... I've GOT to get one of these!" They're widely available here, and very popular, but somehow I missed them. All Malaysian beef products are banned in Singapore, so vendors smuggle the frozen beef patties across the causeway and sell them secretly there, risking their food-stall license to do so.

And what makes a mere burger worth risking one's livelihood? Well, I can tell you that, by pretty much any measure, this thing is a culinary abomination. It makes McDonald's look like health food. So, as you can imagine, it tastes fantastic. Anything this bad for you surely would.

The burger starts out with essentially the cheapest, crappiest, sad little frozen beef patties that (not a lot of) money can buy. You can get a 10-pack from the freezer at Tesco for about RM5 or so, less than US$2, and the question of whether or not any cows were actually involved in the creation of this product might even be debatable. (Note the unintentionally humorous "90% pure meat"—not beef, but meat—sign.) Anyway, Ramly burger carts are, for reasons unknown, almost always found next to 7-11 convenience stores. Everyone apparently knows this except me, so when I asked a friend of mine about this mysterious burger, he said, "Oh sure, there's a stall near my place that has the best Ramly burgers in town." (Indeed, the cart had a little certificate pinned to it from a local newspaper declaring the fat-and-calorie bomb burgers there to be the best in Klang Valley for 2009.) So I was eager to try this thing and then hate myself in the morning for it. First, the vendor cooks a patty on a hot griddle. Mine was cooked in a puddle of dirty grease. Yum. The bun was then split and buttered (likely with some palm oil derivative) and placed face-down on the griddle. Next, he cracked an egg, muddled the yolk around and spread it out very thinly on the hot surface (about 10 inches/25 cm across...wow), then placed the burger patty of doom into the center of the fried egg, then folded up the sides of the egg around the meat, like a little parcel. Some cooks will butterfly the beef patty, slicing it horizontally. This guy didn't, though. He simply seasoned the patty with something called Maggi seasoning, added liberal squirts of mayonnaise and sweet chili sauce, and a dash of thick Worcestershire sauce. His wife was on veggie patrol next to him, so she added a few bits of slivered onions to the burger. The toasted bun was set open to receive the egg-wrapped burger, onto which she added a handful of shredded cabbage or some sort of local lettuce (not like iceberg or romaine lettuce -- it looked very cabbage-y). Then the cook added more mayo, more chili sauce, a bit of mustard, and something that looked like BBQ sauce, mashed the top bun onto it and wrapped it up. There may have been a slice of cheese added at some point, but who would have ever seen it under all that muck and despair? So to recap, we have some beef-like product, fried in a lake of fat, a fried egg, the equivalent of a heaping tablespoon of mayonnaise, the same amount of sweet chili sauce, and a few scraps of cabbage and onion to make it a balanced, nutritious meal. I felt my arteries hardening and my cholesterol rising just watching it be made.

My friend had his burger made, too (it's a fast process) and we walked over to the open-air area of food stalls and tables and prepared to eat this thing. A girl came over for drink orders and I ordered an apple juice, kind of in the same logic as people who order a triple-scoop ice cream sundae with extra chocolate sauce and nuts, and a diet Coke. I will say this: ordering fruit juices at a food stall in KL is a different experience than getting fruit juice at a restaurant in America. It took over ten minutes to get the juice back to me because it's fresh -- they actually pulverize and juice the apples. I should have taken a picture because I foolishly ordered a large ("Small or big?" she asked) and it was huge. HUGE. Probably a full liter of juice. They ask if you want sugar added, but I didn't. It was great, but wow... next time I'll get the small version. The one I had was like an apple orchard in a glass.

As for the Ramly burger...? YUM. Look at this picture. Disgusting, isn't it? What a mess. This was a four-napkin burger and I still felt like I needed a shower afterwards. But ohhhh what flavor. From a calorie and saturated fat perspective, I'm pretty sure this thing would outpace a Big Mac, but wow, it sure tasted good. I'm determined never to get addicted though. Perhaps once a month as a treat. Truly a guilty pleasure.

There's much more news to share -- I'm currently back home in Colorado for the holidays, but will return to KL in early January. I'll be sure to update again soon!