Olivier's weBlog

There are some 1500 french in Kuala Lumpur, the proud capital of Malaysia. How come I haven't met any? Still, I haven't been around much since I'm pretty busy. I guess I'll discover a lot more about the city once my wife comes over. I still haven't found any reliable street maps, but I use a combination of very rough map that shows a few locations around KL and a more detailed one of the center. The only reliable map on the internet is GoogleEarth and it doesn't know the streets of KL.

I wonder how long I have to stay arround here before I start to understand the layout. It seems that it's a very european thing to need a map. Still, I like to know "which way" and "how far". I guess I'll stop caring pretty soon, because taxis know some of the places I have to go to and I think I know the way to my home or my office from the center of KL. I'll add other places as time goes by.

What an incredible city. You'll find some very modern places and some older. Some places, you'd think yourself in a western country, others remind you of other asian capitals. The incredible mixture beween the proud tall buildings and the rain forest is mirrored in the mixture of cultures, languages, religions and skin colours. Everybody seems to speak English fairly well, so it's not too bad if I don't speak Malay. I can still remember some indonesian, but there are a lot of discrepancies between the two languages and some key differences which make me very careful.

I don't want to say the wrong thing. It's easy for a loud mouthed frenchman to hurt someone's feelings and I can't afford to make enemies yet. So, to resume with the variety of the population mix in KL, here is probably the most cosmopolitan city I've ever lived in. I'd like my children to grow up in such an environment to shield them from the dangers of a closed world, closed mind, closed heart.