Escape From the Prison Planet!

Break Free! Escape from the prison planet!

(courtesy of clutch)

I made my escape from Singapore, considering myself lucky to have only lost $300 Singapore dollars in the electronics store... Went looking for an Ipod Nano, came out confused, scratching my head, and with a different mp3 player i didn't even want a half hour later... Apparently they saw me coming...

Anyways, i did get a good deal on a creative zen mp3 player, but it was more the fact that I got sucked into the "one time sale" that had to happen now that irked me... Conclusion, get the hell out of Singapore with one hand on my wallet...

Took the overnight train to Kuala Lumpur Sentral Station, with periodic stops to have my papers checked at 3 border crossing points... I think the guy looked at my passport long enough to see Canada then stamped it and waved me forward with a shiny new 30 day visa - gotta love being a non-threatening country.

Woke up in a Muslim country with a stranger language than Singapore and my first real sights of "authentic asia" - the armless beggar outside the train station, the subway so packed you had to take a running start to squeeze in the door, the buses with no mufflers or catalytic convertors... For some reason I feel much more at home in Malaysia than Singapore, despite the dirtiness and more apparent poverty.

Subconciously, it probably has to do with the fact that i've moved up another social class overnight - no longer the scrubby backpacker shunned by the business elite of Singapore, i'm now the scrubby backpacker scammed by the criminal elite of Malaysia : ) The average person may not like me, but at least they pretend to seperate me from money - ah, good to be cynical...

Anyways, i'm posting up a lot of photos from the past weeks as internet time is only RM $3 an hour here - about 90 cents canadian - i'll also be abusing the webcam, and hopefully skype service here... yay technology, as Thomas Friedman would say, the great flattener of our earth...

Until next time,

Chris