The Good, The Bad and The Just Plain Weird! 1.

The Good, The Bad and The Weird

This is going to be one of a series of posts just observing the, well, good, bad and odd things that we're experiencing here in Malaysia. Please bear in mind theses are personal observations - things seem this way to us and this is not meant to be judgmental in any way, just how things seem from our perspective.

Okay - that is kind of judgmental, but some things are objectively 'bad' so there we are!

The Good: 

I'll start with the people - everyone has been welcoming and friendly; the staff at school, the kids and the locals we're getting to know around the estate we're living on. Malaysia has a reputation for being an open and welcoming country and this feels, so far at least, like a well earned reputation. I've no doubt that there will be asshats in every culture, but they've not put in an appearance yet.

The Bad:

Litter! Malaysians seem to have a very strange attitude towards litter. They just don't see it as a problem! Or at least that's how it appears. I would often bemoan the state of the beaches and streets around Northumberland, but there was a real sense that this was unacceptable and litter was a problem people actively tackled. This is not the case here. It's a problem further compounded by wildlife actively spreading the litter when scavenging for food. This again is a product of the attitude towards, and the management of, waste.

Health and safety in general is of a different standard - for example here's how the gas for cooking gets delivered...

I put this in the 'bad ' category, but I've not seen random explosions in and around the place so maybe it's not as unsafe as it looks?

The Weird:

The service culture. Now you will read some things about how poor Malaysian service culture is compared to Europe or North America, but this is not true. The service is, in many regards, better. I went to join the EPF (a sort of government backed employee savings scheme that acts as a pension) this week and my experience was flawless. This is even though I had been officially given an appointment for the Friday, but couldn't go as I was working. HR at the school told me just to go and see if they'd register me and that's exactly what happened - they gave me a ticket for the queuing system and minutes later I was seen and the process dealt with in less than 30 minutes. Great!

However... There is a flip side. The laid back approach to admin mean's that not everything is as swift as this; ordering things to be delivered can be a fairly fraught process. Stuff comes at random intervals and last week Nicola ended up waiting in for a package which could only be delivered to the person ordering in, not signed for or left somewhere. After three days of waiting we decided to go out and of course that was when the package actually arrived. 

They left it at the gatehouse... you know, the thing they explicitly said they couldn't do.

I suspect that once we're used to it this loose approach will just feel normal, but for the moment it's still in the category of weird.