Saturday 5 April 6, 2003
In foreign eyes.
My old friend Andy’s younger brother Mike was here last Monday. He stopped here for a day on his way to Auckland. I picked him up at the airport and showed him around the place for a day. We, as he described it, did the tourist thing around KL. It was an enlightening experience for me and I hope he gained something out of it too.
If you live somewhere for most of your life, the place becomes so much a part of you that it feels comfortable. You will feel various degrees of emotions about various things but these often come when you stop to think of what you are doing of experiencing. The rest of the day you walk around oblivious to things around you no matter how strange they may be in the eyes of outsiders, because you have gotten used to them.
It’s like living near a railroad. I once lived in a house not far from the tracks. For the first few days or even weeks I heard clearly every train that went by. Then they just fade into the background, thinking back I believe that it must have taken me quite a long time to get used to the trains because if I am not mistaken several trains passed that way, it was the main line from London to Glasgow. One night when my friends from Edinburgh came to visit, shortly after they arrived, we found ourselves catching up on old times in the living room over coffee and some cookies with music playing in the background. Then the record skipped a beat and at the same time my friends almost jumped out of their skins. I remember Semail exclaiming something like, “what was that?!!!!” It took my housemates several moments to remember that it was a train and that we were near the tracks. It was with the same surprise, albeit a little more unpleasant thing time, that Mike reacted to a car that cut into the queue in front of us in a traffic jam at the Sunway – Puchong tollgate. It surprised him that I didn’t even blink let alone honk. Perhaps like many Malaysians, I have become so used to Malaysian driver discourteousness that it did not even bother me anymore. I guess we do it because we don’t think it’s worth taking note anymore.
There were also a few times when his reactions surprised me more than the thing that surprised him. Thinking back to that day, I have since been trying to look at things a little differently. The one thing that I have noticed is that often this was hard to do.
In foreign eyes.
My old friend Andy’s younger brother Mike was here last Monday. He stopped here for a day on his way to Auckland. I picked him up at the airport and showed him around the place for a day. We, as he described it, did the tourist thing around KL. It was an enlightening experience for me and I hope he gained something out of it too.
If you live somewhere for most of your life, the place becomes so much a part of you that it feels comfortable. You will feel various degrees of emotions about various things but these often come when you stop to think of what you are doing of experiencing. The rest of the day you walk around oblivious to things around you no matter how strange they may be in the eyes of outsiders, because you have gotten used to them.
It’s like living near a railroad. I once lived in a house not far from the tracks. For the first few days or even weeks I heard clearly every train that went by. Then they just fade into the background, thinking back I believe that it must have taken me quite a long time to get used to the trains because if I am not mistaken several trains passed that way, it was the main line from London to Glasgow. One night when my friends from Edinburgh came to visit, shortly after they arrived, we found ourselves catching up on old times in the living room over coffee and some cookies with music playing in the background. Then the record skipped a beat and at the same time my friends almost jumped out of their skins. I remember Semail exclaiming something like, “what was that?!!!!” It took my housemates several moments to remember that it was a train and that we were near the tracks. It was with the same surprise, albeit a little more unpleasant thing time, that Mike reacted to a car that cut into the queue in front of us in a traffic jam at the Sunway – Puchong tollgate. It surprised him that I didn’t even blink let alone honk. Perhaps like many Malaysians, I have become so used to Malaysian driver discourteousness that it did not even bother me anymore. I guess we do it because we don’t think it’s worth taking note anymore.
There were also a few times when his reactions surprised me more than the thing that surprised him. Thinking back to that day, I have since been trying to look at things a little differently. The one thing that I have noticed is that often this was hard to do.
Comments