Sent: Monday, June 04, 2007 4:58 AM
Subject: Asia 2007 - Day 4
I keep bumping into people, or rather, nearly bumping into people. At home, I can walk through a crowd of people easily. There are rules that most everyone follows; we usually walk and pass on the right, we keep our eyes ahead, and being the Americans we are, we keep our distance from others. Here it is all different; they walk on the left (just as they drive), so when approaching each other, I instinctively veer right and they veer to their left which of course doesn’t solve the problem, they tend to avoid eye contact, and they don’t make any effort to change course until the last possible moment. Plus, the allowable personal space is almost non-existent – people pass really close to you. They don’t seem to run into each other, so I guess I am the problem.
I did manage to buy a pair of dark socks and a cotton undershirt this morning, so I can complete my business wardrobe if my other bag never shows up, which it still has not. There is another flight coming in from LA this afternoon, but I am beyond getting my hopes up. If nothing else, I am learning how to travel really light.
Today has been primarily a working day. All of the presenters met from 12:30 to 4:00 to go over our presentations together, prior to the audience arriving. It looks like there will be an audience of around 50 here in KL and over 90 in China. I go on day after tomorrow from 8-10:00 AM. After the meetings, I had a nasty headache (medicines are in my missing bag) so I went looking for medication. Nothing at 7-eleven. I went the info stand at the mall and they directed me to the pharmacy in the lower level. An interesting note, the Malay language uses the same characters as English. As I understand it, there was no traditional written language in the Malay peninsula, so during their colonial period they adopted English characters phonetically to their oral language. This gives the language a unique appearance. It also makes it easy to read words that did not have an oral Malay equivalent, like Pharmacy. Here, it is spelled “Farmasy”, avoiding all of the useless phonemes like “ph” replacing the “f” sound. Anyway, I went in search of Ibuprofen or something similar but could not find anything on the shelves. I asked the pharmacist and she did find what I was looking for behind the counter. They are made in Thailand. At least they are not made in China
All of the people attending the meetings have arrived and we met for dinner at the Italian restaurant in the hotel. The people attending are from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Korea, and Singapore, so I imagine Italian food is fairly exotic to them. Truthfully, it wasn’t very Italian, just like Chinese food in America isn’t very Chinese. It was really enjoyable talking to people from so many different places. They seem exceptionally friendly. After dinner a small band started playing. Here is another one of those surreal moments. The band were all Malaysian, One played guitar, another was banging a spatula on a fry pan as a percussion piece, and the remaining 2 sang. And what were they singing? Elvis songs of course. I’m in an Italian restaurant in Malaysia listening to an Elvis impersonator. These are the moments that make these trips worthwhile. By the way, they were pretty good.
After dinner it was back to the Joint again for more beer and , of course, bad American songs from the 70’s being sung by an obviously gay Philippine man and the crowd loving every bit of it. You just haven’t lived until you’ve seen a gay Philippino with a heavy accent sing “…Dat’s da way, Uh huh, Uh huh, I leek it…”, and then lick the microphone like it was something other than a microphone. At one point, David – a very animated salesman from Penang, spilled his beer on me and spent the rest of the night apologizing. It was actually kind of funny and we were joking about it before long. The bar served food which was quite good, a curry style dish which we dipped bread into, some breaded chicken wings without bones (not sure how they do that), and some unidentified matter on a piece of crispy shell. I still don’t ask questions, I just eat and smile. We wound up closing the bar at around 1:30 AM
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