Nov 15, 2006

Well another chapter in the RTSLA. Yesterday the shipping agent and crew showed up at 9:30 and worked nonstop other than a lunch break. By 6:30 the last box was sealed, the truck loaded with most of the household goods. Geetha arrived around 11:30 and I had assumed she would pick up the things we had set aside for her but no, she stayed the entire day, often in the midst of the 7 workmen. When they finished in the master bedroom, I started to sweep the floor because Veena is getting a lot of interest in the house and someone was coming to look at the house. I wanted it to look good. Geetha grabbed the broom out of my hand. No way was she going to let me sweep.

I took Geetha to lunch when the workmen stopped to eat their lunch. It was like a beehive of activity yesterday. In addition to the eight men from EB Creasy shipping agency, we had garbage collection, telephone workman to disconnect the phone, a neighbor coming to see the house and particularly our window screens that are held in place by Velcro, three other neighbors and a potential tenant.

By the end of the day we were exhausted. We called for two cabs around 6:30: one for Geetha and one for us. Geetha started crying and I followed suit. I have grown quite attached to Geetha and I was surprised to see she had similar feelings for us. We loaded three large boxes and two pieces of furniture into the cab. She was still crying as the cab pulled away.

Time flies...this never got posted and now it is Nov 21st. After Geetha left we waited almost an hour and a half for our cab. Apparently the company only has one station wagon that we had requested. Needless to say, we were dog tired by the time we got to the hotel and checked in. We ate a simple meal at a SL fast food place next to the hotel and fell into bed. The next day I went back to the house to meet the shipping guys who needed to load up the last of our boxes and their packing materials and I needed to do some final clean up. Mr. Kularatha, the tri-shaw driver I use, offered to help me. So he swept while I cleaned the refrigerator. He is no ordinary guy! I am so blessed with the people I have met here.

On Thursday, we left early for Kuala Lumpur (KL) in Malaysia, about a three and a half hour flight from Colombo. WOW, what a difference! Malaysia is light years ahead of SL. We had no idea. First of all they have a beautiful, large airport. They have real highways with limited access so you can so fast and they have three lanes in each direction. There are skyscrapers all over KL including the Petronas Towers that until 2003 were the tallest buildings in the world (88 stories). And it’s clean in Malaysia! We rarely saw litter and garbage was rarer still. Things appear much more prosperous there. We saw no trishaws only taxis, only a few bicycles and some motorcycles and lots of cars. The government owns the oil companies so we are assuming that accounts for some of the wealth. On the way from the airport our driver took us through a development that housed al the government offices including the prime minister’s office and residence . It was incredible: all new and well planned with train stations (subways), fountains and an artificial lake. We do not know the name of this ‘city’. Our first afternoon in KL we took a walking tour of Chinatown which is where we stayed. KL is quite easy to get around in using mass transit or on foot. All the buses were new and all conditioned. This is so unlike SL, where most of the buses are ancient and none are air conditioned. In addition there are subways, light rail, monorail and other train lines. Oddly enough each light rail train line was built by a different company so transfers between lines is not possible (who was their transportation planner?) but it is easy enough to walk out of one station and into another. We ate lunch/dinner (4:00) at a really neat café, The Old China Café that had been a guildhall 100 years ago for the laundry association. We ate several Malay dishes including an appetizer called Top Hats. These were little pastries shaped just like a little top hat that you filed with shredded carrots, noodles and cucumbers and topped with a chili sauce.

The next morning we stood in line for close to two hours to get tickets to go up to the sky bridge of the Petronas Towers, 41 stories up. Then we tooled around waiting for our assigned time to go up. It was a beautiful building with a great view of KL but neither us of was sure it was worth a morning of waiting around for the event. The base was a very high-end shopping mall. I couldn’t believe how many high-end malls there were in KL, some right across the street from each other. Many of these malls had designer only shops: DKNY, TagHeuer, Kenzo, Gucci, etc. Places where the two of us would never even darkened the doorway…..we pride ourselves on being the ‘such a deal’ Bergmans. We ate at a Lebanese restaurant in Suria, the shopping center. We attempted to buy tickets to a classical performance in the concert hall but couldn’t meet the dress code requirements for the performance with our sandals. We didn’t take anything but casual clothes for the trip and it seemed too much to go shopping for shoes and appropriate clothes to attend a concert.

Later that day we took a walking tour of Colonial KL and Little India. Our feet gave out after dinner at a glitzy Indian restaurant in restaurant row so we took the monorail and subway back home, stopping at an Internet café to check email on the way.

On Saturday we visited the Museum of Islamic Arts. Here was another sharp contrast to SL where the National Museum has a roof that has leaks and has damaged part of the permanent collection. This Islamic Arts Museum was new and gorgeous. Malaysia is a Muslim country and the museum was built with money from a foundation and the government. The museum is 270,000 sq. feet. Four levels. We saw a display of the Qur’an with examples from as early as the 8th century up to the 20th century. They were beautiful and came is all sizes and descriptions, many with beautiful illustrations in gold leaf. There were displays of textiles, house wares, tiles, arms and armor, metalwork, glassware, and one of our favorites was a display of models of famous mosques from around the world including the Taj Mahal, Mecca and Medina.

We were hungry for lunch so looked at the museum café but they were serving buffet, which was a bigger meal than we wanted. We hailed a cab because we couldn’t figure out from our map how to get to Carcosa Seri Negara where we decided to have lunch. Carcosa was the home of a former British governor about 100 years ago. It is a beautiful very large home that now serves as a very expensive, seven room boutique hotel. There was one couple in the dining room when we arrived. We opened the menu and saw that the fixed price lunch menu was about $65 per person. Hey, not what we had in mind but we turned the page and there were ala carte options. I had a to die for pasta dish with lots of cream and Ron had a Caesar salad. We had a dessert that we shared and I had a cup of tea. We were each given a glass of complimentary wine. It was a $50 lunch. Ha! Afterwards our waiter took us upstairs where we could see one of the rooms. Queen Elizabeth stayed here about ten years ago when she visited.

The next day we went to a museum of the Orang Asli, the aboriginal people of Malaysia. It was out of town about 20 miles but so worth the trip. It was a small museum but what a jewel it was. There are about 18 different ethnic groups in the aboriginal communities of Malaysia, numbering about 150,000. On Saturday we had found a museum/gallery shop that sold masks made by the Mah Meri people so our interest in the museum was piqued when we purchased one of the masks for our growing collection from our travels. The museum honored these people and praised their ability to live with nature and survive in less than ‘ideal’ conditions. It was so impressive and educational with models of their houses, examples of their crafts, house wares, bark cloth clothing, photographs of each ethnic group and maps showing their distribution around Malaysia.

Our cab driver told us a little about Malaysia. All houses are required to have three bedrooms: one for boys, one for girls and one for the parents. He said houses were very affordable and that if you had a ‘proper’ job you could have a house. They cost about $45,000 I think (due to my cryptic notes). I looked up a few more stats: the unemployment rate is 3.6%, inflation 2.9%, about 24.4 million people with 85% living on the peninsula Malaysia and the remaining 15% on Malaysia Borneo Malays including indigenous groups, make up 61.7% of the population, Chinese make up 23.8%, Indians make up 7.1% and others make up the remaining7.4%. Malaysia produces 7.2 million tons of palm oil a year, more than anyone else. Oil was first discovered in 1882. Ninety years later Malaysia set up the national oil and gas company known as Petronas. It continues to have the sole right to develop oil and gas fields across the country. Today Petronas is one o Malaysia’s largest economic entities with assets to the value of RM 239,077 million ($65,486 million), employing 30,000 people in business interests spread across 31 countries.

I have more but will end this for now and add an installment tomorrow. That’s it from five degrees above the equator.