November 16 2007.
We arrived at Brisbane airport at 9.00 with 3 hours to check in relax and wait aimlessly for our 8 and a half hour flight to KL. However, as it turned out, this simple check in process was distinctly more eventful than anticipated. To cut a long story short, with just under three hours until take off, Malaysian Airlines and I got off to a rocky start… so rocky in fact that I had to beg my way onto the flight. In good stead with Asian customer service, we were greeted in a less than chirpy manner by a less than impressed service operator… Colin. Honestly if I knew what would happen by rushing up to Colin’s terminal I may have let the people behind us go first. Due to my complicated itinerary and lengthy stay Colin decided that he had the right to forbid me to board from BNE to KL. Despite the initial flash of all my dreams scanning across my eyes coming to an immediate to almost certain end, I stayed relatively calm… all I can say is that apparently I have learnt something during my $30,000 business degree about the most basic rules of negotiation. My plan was to deceptively manipulate Colin into making him think it was HIS idea to put me on the plane… he was a hard case to crack that’s for sure. Lucky I am a champion bull shit artist, a skill of amazing diversity. Eventually Colin decided to let me on the flight we had booked and paid for months in advance… nice chap in the end really. So after two and a half hours of begging and some high intensity cardio training to make the plane… we made it. However- and this is good advice for any traveler – DON’T PISS OFF THE GUY WHO CONTROLS YOUR LUGGAGE AND WHERE YOU SIT FOR YOUR LONG AND TIRESOME INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT. It turned out Colin got a real perk out of us in the end as he moved me from my seat with Gemma and Chrissy to a seat three rows behind them with the two fattest, smelliest, most restless and noisy Asians you will ever meet in your life. MY GOD IT WAS A LONG FLIGHT. .. you have no idea. In flight entertainment was good…. Which is good because the convo with these two fatties wasn’t so great!!
17th November 2007
We arrived in KL at 6.00 in the morning which was good as it meant that we had the whole day to spend there before we left at 1 am that night/morning. We had a quick cat nap and then decided to leave to go shopping. We wanted to go to the big city to see the twin towers and look around the city. But our hotel was ages from there, about an hour in taxi and an hour and a half on train. The concierge recommended we not go there and that we stay in the outskirts of the city as the shopping was just as good etc. So we stayed where the hotel was, and despite not being in the city centre this day was the most interesting and awakening experience in intercultural education and learning about what it is like to be on the receiving end of outright racial discrimination. We were hated. Literally. I have never had this much out right hatred toward me before and we were all incredibly uncomfortable the whole time. Everyone just stared at us the whole day because we were the only Caucasian people we saw and hence they saw the whole day. Not even at the hotel were there any other white people. People continued to stare and point and laugh at us all day, and none of us had anything in our teeth or toilet paper stuck on our shoe. Eventually we were so confused as to why people hated us so much that we asked our taxi driver; Money. He was a funny man, introducing himself as ‘not American money not Australian money me money’. We asked him why people were laughing at us, his continual attempts to avoid the question were considerable, however he did hint at the fact that the American war on terrorism was a sizeable factor in this racism towards us. Which has clearly been reciprocated by the western people towards muslims. When we asked him if he liked Australian people he started making noises of celebration and didn’t’ really make anymore sense- so we think he did. Well we think he defs liked us because he asked us to his house to have dinner with him. We declined… don’t know why… its not like he is a weirdo taxi driver in a country we don’t know and we didn’t even have a plane to catch? Oh well clearly the next time we rush to KL we will see our funny taxi driver Money.
We went to a really big shopping centre four stories high, which despite being completely run down and dirty, had character. The shopping experience was really weird actually because the shops were really tiny but they would have like ten to fifteen people working in them, and the staff would basically walk on top of you the whole time you were in there to ensure that you wouldn’t steal anything. Every person had 1 to 2 staff members to personally escort them around the store… sounds good but was less than enjoyable. Everything you looked at they asked if you wanted to buy it- ‘you like yes yes you like you buy now yes you buy?” It became so annoying that you almost didn’t want to shop slash look at anything at all. The clothes were really cool but all too small, not so good for the ego, especially when the skinniest Asians in the world were like “no too small too fat for clothes you no buy”(they all speak English and all their signs and instructions and everything are in English because there are three distinct races of people; Indian, Malay and Chinese and English is there common language and also there are lots of tourists so they speak English). We mostly bought accessories because the clothes and shoes, despite being different fashion were all too small. However Chrissy and I did find one store that sold western shoes. I bought a pair of boots for $AUD27 and Chrissy a pair of flats.
There were these curry buns that we were obsessed with, we got like 3 each. It was a sweet bread, not like anything we would have in Aus with curry inside. But the thing was there was no cut or anything in the bread where the curry could have been put in. we were so entranced by how they got the curry in the bread. We concluded that they must have baked the bread with the curry already inside. Such a conundrum. They were like 1 aussi dollar so our research was inexpensive as well as tasty!
After we went to every level and store in this shopping centre, it was called terminal 1. We decided to go to a restaurant that the concierge recommended to us for to taste some real malay food. It ended up being right next to our hotel. The food was amazing… however was served in conditions that perhaps would be against the law in Australia- this freaked us out a little. Mostly their food is seafood- and everything is put in spices or currys… a bit hard to eat if you can’t eat spicy food. The lady that owned the restaurant helped us out by telling us what each thing was. She was really nice. Her sons went to uni in Adelaide and to Bond so she loved Australians. Her husband gave us a lift back to the hotel to have a rest- we had been awake for around 2 and a half days at this stage. He tried to convince us to tell Australians what a great place KL/Malaysia was – especially because he was a politician. He explained to us what he did but it was complicated and short of knowing everything about the Malay parliament is hard to grasp. He explained to us how the three races of people in Malay worked and how it affects tourism and things like that – put a lot of things together and we started to understand maybe why we were not accepted as much as we anticipated we should have been. Once back at the hotel we had a quick little cat nap and decided what we wanted to do next. The man told us it would only take an hour by train to the city centre and so we made plans to go there. Working out that we would still have enough time to go. However as we started looking through our bags we saw that the lady at the shoe shop gave me two different boots so we had to go back and change them. Unfortunately we would no longer have enough time to go to the city. We decided to go back change the boots get some money out and go to another shopping centre. Gemma and Chrissy bought a few more things. We all got manicures and then I got the best Thai massage for an hour while Gemma and Chrissy got half an hour and went shopping.
While we were in this shopping centre we went to this shoe store. They had really cool shoes and we asked the shop assistants for some help with a size. Their reactions to this simple request were to all laugh openly in our face and walk away. We were so shocked we had no idea what to do. So we just put the shoes down and left quickly before the rest of the store started laughing at us. But we were constantly laughed at. And not for things that we were doing- granted I am hilarious. It was because we were westerners. People assumed we were Americans and therefore they hated us.
The ladies at the reception were less than our biggest fans that’s for sure… they hated talking to us, helping us, everything. That night we had a buffet for our included dinner. Us being … well us, ate everything. Literally everything; we had like 5 courses. The waiters didn’t wait on us and they turned around to laugh when we first walked in the restaurant then fought about who would be nice to us. While we stood there completely uncomfortable being like … ‘ok we know you hate us thank you.’ Despite all this it was a good experience over all. We are glad we took an extra 24 hours traveling to go there. I would want to go back there and actually go to the big city to see how differently people treat us. We tried lots of traditional Malaysian dishes which were really nice but so so so spicy. The country was very poor and there was lots of poverty on the streets. Made us appreciate Australia a lot more; in both what we have and also the fact that no one openly hates people like that.
As bad as an experience as this was, I think it was invaluable. To be treated so badly makes you consider how you treat Asians and Indians and Muslim people. And perhaps there is room for improvement here too. I think that these experiences are the ones you need when you travel. Otherwise it is not as rich as you would want it to be. KL was truly awakening that’s for sure.
