Malaysia – Frustrations In Ipoh

By Rough Guy’d

One thing I learned as I stayed at my uncle’s house in Ipoh after having come back down from the Cameron Highlands was that even though I was their guest from overseas, they didn’t seem to know what to do with me. Of course, I wasn’t the only guest as we still had two carloads of people staying over as well, some coming from as far away as Singapore, but in particular I felt a bit left out.

Though I could converse with them, they really didn’t seem to know what to say and moreover they seemed to prefer conversing to each other in a dialect called Hakka. As I couldn’t understand a word of Hakka, I was sort of left out of the loop.

Even worse was the fact that the house was far away from the town centre and there was not a single computer or Internet cafe nearby nor anything that I could walk to. As it was, I ended up hiding in the air-con room to get avoid from the mosquitoes as much as for the comfort playing on my DSi.

My increasing frustration over my situation must have been noticed by some of my relatives because after three days of this, I was finally given an out. My cousin from New Zealand was coming over for the wedding and I was offered a place to stay with her and her family.

I’m sure all the talk of my (very) numerous relatives must be slightly confusing so to keep it simple, the wedding was for my cousin on my dad’s side of the family, different to the relatives from my mum’s side of the family that I had been staying with thus far.

As well as being able to catch up with my cousin again after three months of being away, it was a relief for me to be able to finally talk in English again at a normal speed. While I’m not suggesting that people in the Asian countries that I’ve been to thus far cannot speak English, their level of English is still not the same as a native English speaker and many times, even to my educated family, I was unable to speak at my normal speed without something getting lost in translation.

The best way to imagine it is to walk at your normal speed and then force yourself to move at half of that speed. After a while of doing this, go back to your normal speed and you will roughly get what I mean.