Hi! Still got a week left in Malaysia. Yup, still using the wi-fi in Starbucks. Do you know how rare Starbucks is here? Back home, there would be a Starbucks every other block, but here, I had to take a half hour drive to a mall to get one. Apparently people here don’t drink much coffee seeing as there aren’t many other coffee shops either. Also the stuff here is really cheap. Most things here are the same price number as Canada, but the exchange rate is 3 RM = 1 CAD so it’s a good deal living and eating here. The down side is that the food sometimes isn’t always clean. We would often eat in those outdoor places and watching them make the food is a little bit unappetizing. There’s a night market here that I went to a few times. In Malaysian, they call it “basam alam” and it’s much like the night market back home. It’s quite nice but smells like the highway because they use their cars/motorcycles to power the lights of the stalls and you’d breathe in exhaust all the time.
Ipoh isn’t much of a sight-seeing place. There are some really nice mosques and some churches, but other than that the buildings here are quite dull and frankly shoddy. That might also have to do with the fact that we don’t really go out of our way to look at tourist-attractions here. Sometimes, we’d pass by an alley with garbage littered all over the side. My sister (aka The Super Sniffer courtesy of her sensitive sense of smell hahaha) suffers quite a bit. I’ve realized that travel is very much engaging in the five senses. Looking at new places and people. Smelling and tasting different food. Listening to the native people’s language. To be honest, I don’t really engage in my senses much. I relate to what Sheldon said in one Big Bang Theory episode, something in the lines of “My body and I have a distant but friendly relationship”. But having been in a place other than home for the past two weeks have taught me that there really is lots to see out there. It’s more than just google imaging the Sydney Opera house or reading up the Wikipedia page on Mongolian people. It’s much more than following a recipe for curry chicken or learning Chinese from Saturday school. It really is so much more different when you’re here and you’re bombarded by new things, and you learn something new everyday.
So, true to my non-sensing nature, I’ve observed a lot of the culture/traditions/way of life around here. I feel very much like an anthropologist! The Chinese people here are very much like the Chinese people back home (well, the non-Westernized somewhat newly immigrant Chinese families). They hang out with their own people, eat pretty much the same food. They don’t really engage in much Malaysian culture. I can’t really speak for all Chinese people in Malaysia but my side of the family is quite traditional. Their way of raising their kids is very strict and sometimes physical punishment is used. At the same time though, they are very family-oriented, and the parents love their kids and sacrifice a lot for them. The family structure is quite matriarchal and it’s usually the women in charge, organizing everything, leading the conversations. The men are just all relatively quiet, and mostly do the driving, heavy duty lifting, etc. I would say it’s quite traditional in this sense.
In terms of religion, there are a lot of Muslim people here. I don’t know much about Islam as a religion (only briefly studying it in grade 8 but I don’t remember anything) but I know they are quite conservative in terms of how they dress. I have immense respect for them seeing as it’s super hot and they still wear a lot of clothes. My relatives are all mostly Buddhists and so every house I would smell incents and see those statues. I have one uncle (my father’s brother) who is a very much into Buddhism and he carries a chanting tape wherever he goes. He shaved his head and frequently meditates (when we’re all watching tv – speaking of which, they show Korean dramas here, what do you know!) A lot of them, though, aren’t as religious as that uncle of mine. In fact, some of my aunts are quite open to new religions and ask my parents to talk to them about Christianity. We are planning to go to a church this Sunday with them and I’m really looking forward to seeing what churches here are like.
