Category: KL/Ipoh, Malaysia

Training

I’m in Malaysia and the weather has just been fantastic. Flew in Saturday morning, day before the unfortunately named Typhoon Longwang. From KLIA went directly up to Ipoh to see my cousin who was on holiday from China. It was nice as my uncle’s family was all back and could spend time with them. Always enjoy that greatly. Definitely a Mastercard moment.

Sunday, came back down to teach a Project Management 5-day Boot Camp class of 16 people who will mostly sit for the PMP cert exam. A few glitches with the logistics created some problems and we’ve been scrambling to fix things up. US HQ held up the books and materials and then shipping seemed to have it stuck in a facility somewhere. Its not easy to do training 9 hours on your feet and trying to not bore people to death. Not to mention that while the material isn’t new to me, their presentation of it is so had to tailor on the fly my presentation. So far, I think so good, and enjoying myself, but got 3 more days of this. Wish me luck.

Oh, and Malaysia is really nice…. I might make that circle complete after all……

=YC

En Route ….. still

I thought after thousands of miles of traveling I know pretty much most of the “finer print” stuff related to travel. I was mistaken. Apparently, under the code “G” for group, everyone under that code must travel together. So in my case, me and my wife with the plane tickets in that group needed to check-in and board together. We didnt’ know that until B- needed to stay back in Malaysia. I thought I’d just go ahead use the ticket and reschedule B-‘s portion. Bzzzt, thank you for playing. So spent the day scrambling to find tickets back to Taipei.

Thank God for JetStarAsia, which I think will really compete head to head with AirAsia operating out of Kuala Lumpur Malaysia. It is now much cheaper to fly into and from Singapore Changi to destinations supported by ValueAir and JetStarAsia. So much so that there’s no need to fly into KLIA as the bus tickets from Singapore’s Golden Mile on Beach Road costs no more than US$7.50 to KL’s Puduraya. There’s about a dozen or so bus lines that do this trek and lots of people use it. You can save hundreds of dollars just by doing that if you’re willing to deal with the inconvenience of a 5-6 hour bus ride into KL. I am.

Having said that though, my trip last night was a real pain in the ass. Thought I was buying a Grassland bus from KL -> Singapore but found that it was really a ticket for Eltabina Ekspress. Well, the bus was okay, decent shape and not too full so I was able to lounge out for the bus ride down. It was getting to the Singapore’s customs that became a problem. I got stuck behind a bus load of Thai migrant workers. The individual time for custom’s to process them took about 5-7min each. I was standing in line for about 30+ minutes. Just enough time for my bus driver to leave me there at Singapore customs’s in Woodland. I was pissed needless to say.

Luckily there were plenty of taxi’s at 5am there and I was dropped off at the nearest MRT station. For SGD 2.90 I traveled from there to Changi Airport. One of the cheapest, cleanest, efficient and worry free trip one can take anywhere. Trip took about an hour with the two transfers along the way.

Now I’m banging away at one of the many free Internet terminals here…. can’t focus on the technical writing I need to do so I’ll just have to flush this day, relax and go with the flow. Next week will be a doozy — faced with having to move my office, apartment into a new place without B-‘s super efficient packing and cleaning skills. And having to finish some deliverables….

Thank God for coffee… I’ve fallen off the wagon. Oh well. Such is life.

BTW, based on the news reports, the New Orleans Katrina disaster seems totally off the wall. Is it worse than it reads? Tsunami devastation we’re talking about there? FEMA another disaster of a Federal Agency….

Laters,
=YC