Sitting beside me was a German who has a permanent residence in malaysia, TIna. She worked in a Wood export company in Mont Kiara. she has been in malaysia for 5 years now. She was a nice girl compared to the woman in the German embassy in KL who was a bit intimidating. haha. well when we arrived at frankfurt airport, Tina said he thought that frankfurt airports looked so old and so small compared to KLIA. No comment on my side...She liked KLIA better and she liked Malaysia even more. she said she liked malaysia as it had better weather and nice people. For a moment there, I felt proud to be malaysian. Yet we malaysians still complain a lot about malaysia..
At Frankfurt airport i was supprised on how the security was very loose. U can get past the immigration with 10KG of drugs without getting caught. Wait a miniute..... in Germany, the drug addicts are given injection needles and drug for free...so there is no need for drug dealing...something our government wanted to implement in malaysia, but trust me, it doesn't work.
anyway, my next destination was the train station. Due to the confusing signboards, i was forced to ask the information counter. At first i was reluctant to ask because i kindda underestimated the level of english of german ppl and according to past experience in Japan, if you ask directions from someone that does not know english, your bound to get lost!! however it turned out OK. so i took the monorail to the train station. At that moment i could for the first time see the vast size of the frankfurt airport. it was huge!
As the monorail stopped, i thought i was at the trainstation, but no. i had a marathon in front of me. I had to go through a network of walkways and escalators with confusing signboards. So again, im forced to ask. By now i had a better impression of level of english of the German ppl.
OK so now im at the train station.The first thing a normal person would do is buy a ticket, isnt it? Well, there was just a tiny problem.The ticket machine were totally in German....i was like, oh OK, now i need to find a German language class, graduate and come back here to buy a ticket. haha.Little to my expectations, i was saved by a salesman. Yes, a salesman. U know, the kind of people you ignore at the shopping complex and occasionally you let your dogs loose to eat them alive... Well this guy was selling credit cards and since i dont qualify to sign up for one, i asked him for some help. Turns out that there is a ticket counter nearby to buy the tickets manually. I was, like, oh OK, i hope their english was ok...
at the ticket counter, something happened that quite impressed me. I was a bit blur on which counter to go to. In that confusion, 2 guys potong my queue to the counter. To my suprise, the clerk at the counter asked the guys to get in line behind me because the have jumped the queue. i was ..wow, thats new!!.... so i bought the train ticket and i was on my way. By the way the ticket costs 21 euros, which was close to RM100!!! there was a cheaper one for 14 euros but i had to take it at another train terminal which was far away. because i didnt want to go through all the trouble of going to the other train station and also changing trains half way, i just took that train.
The train was 5 minutes late, so much for german punctuality. It was a half hour journey to mannheim and it was a quiet an comfortable one. the trains were quite advanced with the speed of KTM kommuter, it was 80% more quiet, 100% more comfortable and it had WiFi internet!!
So i arrived at the mannheim train station at about 11am and what a beautiful day it was. Sunny day, cool breeze.Now i had to find Henrik, the reception coordinator. So as i was going to stay here anyway, i bought a Vodafone simcard...My h/p number..? well i will SMS Tina Koh and what comes out will be my h/p number. Ask her for my number. you guys are welcomed to sms me anytime. i tried sms-ing my parents and it works.
So the 1st day was spent settling down at my hostel, going around mannheim and the AIESEC office. by the way the AIESEC office was HUGE...it basicaly was an apartment, with a office, meeting room, kitchen and store.
later that night Henrik and i went to a bar watch a champions league match between Bayern Munich and AC Millan. We were joined by Anna, an ex trainee and one of henriks friends which i dont remember his name. lets call him John... Well, John was a very interesting guy. He did an internship under Bosch in Penang. I cant believe my luck, meeting a guy that has been in malaysia for 3 months. Well we had a lot to talk about. He always praised about how malaysians were really nice people and how Penang was lame and dirty....(sorry Penang people). there was once he and his friends went to the beach in Penang (which was dirty and with a lot of jellyfish). One of his friends jumped into the sea and got stung by jellyfish... .so what they did was collect urine and put it on the wounds..haha it was really funny.. by the way, if u get stung by jellyfish, u should put alcohol on it (got this from Mythbusters) . Anyway, we continued on chatting about his trips to perhentian island and KL.really loved Perhentian Island and basically fell in love with it. He loved KLs night life very much!! he partied all night long when he was there and it was really funny when he told me his encounters with "Bapok's"... it was basicaly the only word he remembered in Malay...hahah. I enjoyed talking to him. He really loved Malaysia (not the food) mostly(according to John) because the people are nice, places are beautiful and its really safe walking the streets of Malaysia(is it??). It's sometimes suprising what foreigners say about our beloved country, but as long as they enjoyed their stay its good enough...
Well the first day was a blast... what will the following days have in store for me?
No comments:
Post a Comment