Backbreaking Yoga, the Batu Caves, Racist Malaysia and My New Apartment
Once again this post is a long time coming.
After work one day last week we all decided to go for the first of hopefully many yoga sessions to come. The image i had in my mind of a room dominated by middle aged whilist having a relaxing, spiritual moment turned out to be the litteral opposite of what happened.
Never again will i mock (heated) yoga. That 1 hour session was easily one of the most strenuous of my life. Made all the worse by the beautiful and toned Malaysian women who perfrmed each move gracefully as i stumbled and sweated through the hour, loosing around 2 litres in fluid. However, it's now a weekly thing and i was overcome with utter relief when the hour was up and i had survived without being touched up by the extremely freaky instructor.
Batu Caves
On the weekend we all travelled to the Batu Caves, which are located just outside of KL on about a half an hour train journey. The site of a hindu temple, and obviously a cave system. We climbed the hundreds of steps, avoiding the rabis infected monkeys (see attached) and made it to the caves which were a pretty incredible spectacle and had a great atmosphere.
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| Eye of a warrior |
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| It sees all |
Later, myself, Keith and Jack threw some extra ringitt down and went for a 40 minute walk in the pitch black through another cave system, inhabited by an endangered species of spider, snakes that dropped down from the cieling (hundreds of feet high) and a shit ton of bats that flew about ready to swoop down and feast on our blood at any moment. Some of the creatures in here were pretty huge and it was a truly awesome, and serenly peaceful experience. Most notably when the tour stopped, everyone went quite and we took in the complete and utter silence.
Anyway, here's some pictures of this giant hindu sclupture at the entrance of the stair climb, along with some other snaps of the day.
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| Technical term : Cave Bug. |
Racist Malaysia
“So you’re both from England? That’ll be an extra 500 ringit
on your deposit”
“Wait… What?”
And so we are subject to another example of the not so
subtle racist culture in Malaysia. By not so subtle I mean constitutionalized
and embedded into law for all to see and abide. Don’t get me wrong from the
first few weeks ive spent here I really like the place, but I struggle to
imagine someone in the UK getting charged 30% extra because they are lets say
Malaysian taking it to well. This
extends to increased prices on cars, houses, broadband etc, etc for anyone whose
not a second generation Malay as far as
I can tell. Meaning if you moved to Malaysia and married a native, your kids
would get these benefits but not yourself. (I think that’s right) I haven’t
experienced any white boy beatings or anything like that, but this kind of
government endorsed discrimination is goanna take some getting used to.
Villa Florra
Finally it was time to move out of the literal prison come sweat box that the University of Malaysia had so graciously provided us. Something that would later come to cost us 215 ringitt for the 2 week stay. Undoubtely the worst purcahse i have ever and am likely to ever make in my life.
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| One of the pools at Villa Florra, pic stolen from tom. |
Villa Florra is very nice, 2 pools, a gym somewhere, tennis and badminton courts, not that i give a toss about sports, but it's nice to have i guess. It's a complete contrast to the slum we were living in, and it was an absolute relief to finally move in and start to settle down for the next 12 months.
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Roof pool on the gym, overlooking the KL skyline (not spectacular from this angle)
Adiós Amigos |
500 Ringgit deposit isn't because you are English! It is because you don't live here, so you can run away without paying a full contract!
ReplyDeleteIt is a deposit, not an extra surcharge, this means you will get it back, you dummy... If this ain't your home, it is easy to run away from the bills you don't want to pay. There IS a lot of explicit racism, of course there is the bumiputra privileges, but this 500 deposit is not one of them.
And one other thing, WHAT ON EARTH IS THAT BUG!? Nightmares...
ReplyDeleteI don't see why being a foreigner would make it more likely for us to do a runner, considering that as far as she was concerned i was a permenant resident of this country, i just wanted the contract for the next 12 months which is pretty standard. She made it pretty clear that even if i had lived here the last lets say 10 years, and was going to continue living here for the rest of my life i would still have to pay more beause my nationality wasn't Malaysian. I guess it might have something to do with my citizenship, although that never came up. The fact that we were white and English meant we automatically got charged the 500, regardless whether we were permenant residents or where our citizenship was. Obviously i didn't come to this country to compare it to back home, but there's no way that kinda shit would fly in the UK. Also i know it's only a deposit, but between cars, buying new tyres, doctors check ups, deposits, rent, changing ownership, insurance etc my budget is getting stretched pretty thin aha.
ReplyDeleteRegardless, wassup bro? Long time no speak.
This comment was a welcome break from the extreme lack of work i'm not doing ;)
Hah it did give me a bad case of the hee bee jee bees. The spiders were worse, i kept almost walking into them and had to supress the girlish screams.
ReplyDelete