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Published: January 25th 2005
My first impression of Malaysia reminded me of a Paul Simon song "You can Call me Al".
in one of the verses, the narrator finds himself a stranger in a strange land. He doesn't speak the language, holds no currency. Hears the sounds of cattle in the marketplace. Yadda Yadda.
I arrived in a bus stop half way to Melacca (or Melaka, or any of the other 15,000 ways I have seen the city's name spelled). I was starving, and really needed to use the toliet.
Too bad for me I forgot to covnert some cash into Malaysian before I left. It was such a mad rush to jump on the bus, that I totally forgot.
After moping for a few minutes on my bad luck, I decided to see if the vendors might happen to accept Singaporian moolah. It turns out that they would.
This theory was put to the test when I tried to buy a bunch of bannas from a kid who clearly spoke no English. He wouldn't sell me one banna (which was all I could afford with the limited amount of Malay change that I had left from a previous transaction).
He also didn't know the Singaporian/Malaysian exchange rate. He called in his elder sister for backup to sort out the issue. She really didn't know English, or the exchange rate better than I did. They both just laughed as I tried to gesuture my way through:
1 Singapore dollar = 1.96 Malaysian Riggits.
Ever tried to act out the number 1.96? It's tougher than it might seem! We all had a good laugh at my expense - those kids were quite funny! I played up the clown bit by trying to pay them in a combination of coins from the US, Hong Kong, Chang-Dynasty Chinese (I picked this up at a market in Hong Kong), Malaysia, and Singapore. Each time I brought out a new crazy coin, they would just shake their heads and laugh. It was great. Finally I got my bannas, and all was well in the world. I think I paid 2 or 3 times what they were worth, but I thought it was money well spent to see those smiles.
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anonymous
non-member comment
fun travels
Hey man - I just read through your travelblog - its fun to travel along with you. How'd you manage past 4am so many nights in a row? I'd fall over, even if I wasn't drinking. Anyway, good luck with the rest of the travels and your currency charades - Mike Hardy