First week of work.

[Thursday July 26^th] Well its my fourth day at work in Penang. Things are a bit hectic but all is fine. We went out for a bit longer of a lunch with Kok Soon and his wife. It was a fairly typical hawker center. Booths scattered about. We all ended up getting food at the same place. We didn’t know what we were ordering so KS took care of it for us ;). You can see a picture of Sandy and I. Sandy is an employee from our Australian customer. He’s came to Penang to work on my project with me for a while.

In one of the pictures you can see some of the strange fruits they have here. They seem quite aggressive in comparison to our fruits. They have spikes, etc. Quite strange. Also you can see what I see when I look down off my balcony. Its called a ‘village’. They have some huts and free roaming chickens of all things. Very strange to hear the local Mosque in the morning followed by a bunch a chickens!

Not far from my apartment is the Queensbay Mall, it is huge! Its not quite as big as the Mall of America but I’d say about 50% as big! They even have a small carnival out in the parking lot. The ground floor is primarily food places, their biggest place is actually a mall version of a Hawker center! Its pretty upscale and stands out quite a bit from the rest of the establishments here not as authentic or gritty but still quality local food. Their only anchor store is Jusco, they have a little of everything. It’s like a Super Wal-Mart but bigger. I went shopping there for a steam iron since the one they gave me here is a dry iron. I’m bad enough using a steam iron, just ask Anna :) So for me to use a dry iron is just not happening. I tried it and whew, there I went to buy a real steam iron. They ranged from 33 ringgit(MYR) all the way up to 270MYR. I got the cheap 33MYR which is about $10USD (US Dollars).

Buying stuff here can be a bit different. For example, they have a ‘testing counter’ here. When you buy something such as the iron I bought, you take it to the testing counter where they unbox it and try to make sure it works. After that they validate the warrenty to prove it did work. Its quite strange, I guess to keep prices down they skip the quality control that we’re used too! ;)

Well The weekend will bring quite a bit of fun I’m sure. Stay tuned!

-Terry