Penang -- Catching up, Week 5

This feels like ancient news now, but...

Week 5
FRIDAY, April 11th, Move in Day!
It's heeeeere! Yay!
We spend the morning casually shoving stuff into suitcases (it wasn't orderly enough to call it "packing") thinking we can just make as many trips as necessary and toss stuff in the car and not worry about airline-ready packing. We're desperately waiting for the moment we can finally be at our new place. We're told that the place won't be "ready" till 2pm. We get there 1:40pm.

Our agent is almost exasperated that we're there early when we call her. The security guy waves us in and tells us to park at the building, so we decide to go ahead and go inside.

We go up to our floor, and someone is there working inside. We ring the doorbell, no answer, we go in! But it's not really our place yet, so we take off our shoes at the door. The guy working is putting up curtains and doesn't acknowledge our presence. Regin is sleeping so we set his car seat on the floor.

We walk around and wait. It's hot. Windows and doors are open to the "cool breeze" outside. This seems to be the norm here. George and I can't wait to kick everyone out so we can close everything and blast the "air conds" and put our shoes back on! Our agent, Joo Lee, arrives, the landlord's rep & assistant arrive. Joo Lee pulls out some paperwork with a sort of inventory of every room. Several copies. Crap! We can't just sign and move in?

More workers arrive. As Joo Lee walk us around, and as we start to get high from paint fumes (the workers are spot painting walls as well as painting entire doors) we begin to see how "ready" the place is. Apparently the previous tenants have done a number on the place, so they were unable to get everything finished for us. We're told they cleaned like crazy the day before. If that's the case then the dinge on all the tiles is what? Stain? Great!

I'm not sure how much we care about it at this point. I just want everyone out, and to close and lock the door behind us and to not have to put up a "do not disturb" sign anymore. So I'm agreeable. The windows have some unwashable gunk? ok. The cabinet doors covering the hot water heater in the kitchen have to be removed and it might be weeks before they are replaced (think danger to toddlers)? no problem. The hot water heater for the kitchen sink doesn't work? Someone will come soon to fix? no biggie. The kitchen counter is skuzzy and peeling and burned up like crazy? No problemo. The bathroom windows have no blinds and everyone outside can see us in there? Not an issue. We're one curtain panel short for the living room? Who needs that many curtains when you live in a fishbowl! Rooms 1, 2, & 3 are missing x, y, & z? We'll manage. Where do we sign?

I'm dying of heat by now, so I leave George to sign while I walk the block to the Shell station for some cold water and AC. Handy! I walk back and... we're done! We can move in! We bring up all of our stuff, but guess what? We can't leave the place! The workers are still doing things for our "ready" place. We have to wait. Ages. In the hot place. Poor Regin is sweating in his sleep.

When they finally say goodbye, it's late, it's pushing dinner time. We rush back to the other side of the island to get the rest of our stuff. We drive back, unpack, and scream over to the mall down the street for towels, pillows, and sheets. The whole mall is closing its doors as we walk in. The department store we go to is still open, thankfully, but barely. We buy a few things without time to think about it, and we're ushered out the employee exit. It's quitting time, and there is a crowded hall of exiting employees going through a security check point. We're not exactly sure how to get to the car from here. But Phew! We go home, exhausted, put the sheets on the bed... we have no comforter! Ugh. I can't stand to sleep uncovered. Especially with it as cold as George likes it at night time.

It's difficult to stay asleep. Thankfully though, all the noises we're afraid of keeping us up are impossible to hear over the constant whir of the fans and air cond on max. In fact, we can't even hardly hear each other shouting from the next room. George! Help! I've fallen and cracked my head on the floor and I think I will be in trouble if I don't get immediate attention! George! George! George???


SATURDAY
In the morning, George makes a phone call while enjoying the view.



We show Regin one of the geckos living in our apartment and he tries (for about 2 seconds) to chase it.


We are so not ready to go to Kuala Lumpur & IKEA today. We need some kind of duvet or blanket. We need plates, utensils, toilet paper! Not to mention the fact that we have no idea how we want to decorate this place. Bummer. I guess we'll have to wait. We thought again about getting the island tour. But we don't have time. We are shuttling from store to store again, looking for our needs. Meanwhile, we're noticing a few things in the apartment: the fridge doesn't work, there are lots of red ants, we can't open and close some windows without curtains coming off their tracks, we can't open and close some curtains without the tracks coming off the walls! When they come back to work on our place, we tell them about issues.

The workers are so weird. It's customary here to remove your shoes before you enter a person's home. It's polite. It prevents dirt from traveling in. I don't understand why it's not a little gross to everyone here to have people's sweaty, bare feet walking around on your white-tiled floor, or why it's also polite to leave your front door open (letting all the hot air in), but no matter, it'll be over soon. Besides, the place was "ready," we're just getting touch ups.

We go ask the guys at Celcom at the mall about their wireless broadband -- it's the only kind we can get since we don't have a land line and those are prohibitively expensive for foreigners. The wireless deal has its foreigner penalty also: a 500RM "deposit." George is so good at thinking everything through and asking all the right questions, so he asks how we will go about getting that deposit back. They say that it will take about 3 months after we cancel our service to pay us and that we will go to the center in George Town to pick it up. I ask if it can be applied to our credit card. Nope. It has to be check. So we have to open a local bank account to cash it. And how will we pick it up or cash it when we will be back in the States anyway? It's recommended that we cancel our internet service three months before we leave Penang! ARE YOU FREAKIN KIDDING ME? I tell the guy that I have been without internet for one day and I'm dying! He nods his head that it's important. I tell George it's basically a scam. They assume that we'll just pay it and figure it as a loss. George tries to ask the guy some specific/technical questions. That never goes well here. Even when you find someone whose English is "great" neither of you can understand each other enough for the kind of specific semantics that George tries to use to be understood. I'm trying to teach him to simplify his English. For instance, he didn't know that "high chair" needed to be simplified. The restaurant worker he said it to gave us a confused look. I translated: "baby chair." "Oh!! Baby chair, yes, yes!"

Back at the apartment, we start doing laundry with our front-loading washer (yay). But the number of loads we can do in an evening is limited by the amount of drying space on the balcony -- there is no dryer. No dishwasher either. No microwave, but I've been dying to rid myself of any microwave addiction anyway, so this will just help me.

More soon...