Budget Malaysia 2011

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hi,

The problem with overseas trips is that there's a need to justify them with some brilliant "road to Damascus" observation. I thought that the ministers' wives had a charity organisation that they used to fund shopping trips for themselves to Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore? I never read about shopping trips to Lot 10.   

All Yen Yen needs to do is to get out of the limo, get the handbag carriers in tow, and try walking as a shopper in KL or Georgetown. Uneven pavements are the least of the worries as shoppers hassle with cars, faulty pedestrian crossings (if any found), potholes, motorbike parking anywhere, monsoon rain/blazing sun, and for what? Some run down shopping mall with 50% outlets closed, selling not much. Komtar springs to mind.

This isn't a moan just an observation as if Malaysia were otherwise it would be Singapore.      So it's not something that I mind, my designer vest from several years ago is as good as this seasons.

Keep Malaysia cheap and cheerful, and let the shoppers go to Singapore, or Phuket. And mend the pavements.

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hi,

Another landmark project "Warisan Merdeka" which includes a 100-storey tower, the tallest in Malaysia, at a cost of RM5 billion to be completed by 2015.

If you don't get it, you don't get it.

Attract tourists? The Twin Towers only attract tourists in lieu of anywhere else to go. It's not as if KL has much to see. In fact what does it have in the way of historic buildings, squares, piazzas, boulevards, fountains. It's a street-scape-less place.

And Pudu prison got pulled down. Jeez.

For me, I doubt that the low expectations that Malaysia sometimes delivers on will change much.

And why would I mind. I've maybe got 20 more years before my personal expiry date, and that's with a better diet (unlikely) and exercise (remote, very remote). The bosses here will continue to be diverted by being bitterly envious of Singapore, and totally awe-struck that Thailand always does better despite it's troubles.  And Malaysia can continue as an easy-going, and generally forgiving sort of place.

A 100 storey office building, tallest in Malaysia. Jolly good. Just the ticket. Stick a flag on it.   

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Ah, Scott, pavements you say? Well, I am now three weeks in Penang and, while I am utterly loving it for many reasons, I have to say that the state of the pavements anywhere except the seaward side of Gurney Drive is little short of scandalous, Third World-like, in fact.

That, added to the fact that some roads are impossible to cross as a pedestrian because of traffic flying towards you from all sides, an almost total absence of pedestrian crossings, the most ignorant and uncaring drivers it has ever been my misfortune to encounter, and motor cyclists with a death wish, and what should be a paradise island is, instead, a rather scruffy backwater. I still love it, mind! 

I am only slowly beginning to understand the ethnic rivalries that seem to have led to this lack of investment but, dear God, how quickly they could make Penang a world-class destination were the willl to be found.