Today, too, I work slowly at Starbucks for lunch and have fried rice for dinner!
Today, as before, at my favorite Jalan Alor street.
The fried rice I had the other day was so good that I could eat it for 10 ringgit…so I came to Jalan Alor because I really wanted to eat it! When I was walking around, I think Malaysians probably don’t like to walk because I hardly see people walking on the sidewalks lol.
Mango sticky rice! The best!
Bustling night market today
But since I am here today, I want to go to a different restaurant. The streets here are mostly written in Chinese, and there are a lot of similar dishes, so I want to try something different. The restaurant that does fried food looked very good.
So today I decided to order fried rice at a Thai restaurant!
Today’s fried rice! Very salty but delicious!
Menu list. Nice.
After dinner, I went to a nearby shopping mall. It was a Japanese shopping mall! There was even a Don Quijote there, which was a real surprise.
After returning to the hostel, talk with Malaysian guy
He is a temporary resident of my hostel who came to talk to me while I was just working at the desk. He told me that, like me, he loves to travel and has been to Indonesia before. So he told me a lot about Indonesia. I was planning to go to Bali after Jakarta, so he told me that I should take the train instead of the plane and go down there little by little.
That way I could see with my eyes a more human way to go, and he taught me that rural life is the true human way to go. Get out of your comfort zone and bet on yourself. He taught me that it is so important. He told me that he loves places without wi-fi because that is where he can learn and feel the real “life”. But I understand his feeling and I thought he is a really wonderful person.
Also, he told me that he is spending a little more time with the hostel management because he is Moroccan and he is going back to Morocco.
He also knows a little Japanese and studied Korean and Chinese at university. So he can talk a little. I thought that is great. He is now a private trader and has a lot of computers at home, and he is doing virtual currency and FX. So he is very knowledgeable about money.
I asked him which country left the biggest impression on him.
He replied, “Northern Pakistan”.
When I asked him why, he told me that people in Pakistan are very welcoming and warm, even treating travelers in a special way. He said that the impression of insecurity that he sees on TV is garbage. I agree. The media is just brainwashing the people. So you really don’t know unless you go there.
Besides, people in Pakistan seem to be very shy, so much so that they run away when foreigners come to their city especially in countryside. That’s why they are so interesting. And the women are very beautiful with both eyes of different colors.
What he finds most attractive is that they have “a true human way of life”. He said, “We, especially in developed countries, have changed because of ‘competition’ and ‘technology,’ which has given us worries that ancient people didn’t have. However, the people in the “northern part of Pakistan” are living a truly ancient life, a truly human life, and that is what is so fascinating to him. He told me such things. Really, that’s why I decided to go to the north whenever I go to Pakistan. Thank you very much for telling me. I appreciate it very much.
I also asked him about Brunei. I had never heard of Brunei, although Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam are popular among Japanese. When I asked about it, I was surprised to hear that the currency is very strong, three times expensive than that of Malaysia. The Brunei dollar is a very strong currency, and Brunei has more natural resources than Malaysia, and although the size of the country is very small, it seems to be a very rich country. It is a Muslim country, and I heard that two days are enough for sightseeing. But there are no bars or clubs there. So I asked, “How are they enjoying their lives?”. They seem to find happiness in “everyday relationships with people”.
I see. In other words, for us, it has become so commonplace that we don’t feel happy anymore, even though we are really happy of our normal life to communicate and interact with people in a daily basis. However, I realized that they are very pure people who feel “true happiness” and “basic happiness” as happiness. So it is very important to go to such countries and feel something new, and I wish I could go there too. So, I have nothing but gratitude to him. Thank you so much.
