Apartment?

Let me start with a little geography. Kuala Lumpur is the capital of Malaysia. This is a huge city with about 4.1 million people. It is home to the Petronas Towers, two giant spiral buildings connected by a bridge at about the 41^st floor. At one time these were the tallest buildings in the world and you may remember them from a James Bond movie where James does some bad ass base jumping. Kuala Lumpur (KL) has lots of housing options in many different and unique parts of the city. KL is about an hours commute-one way-by train to Bangi. Bangi is a small town South of KL and is home to UKM University, the school where we will be taking our language course and where the bulk of Casey’s research will take place. Bangi does not have an abundance of housing options.

We have decided to rent a house in Bangi. I was going to spend a lot of time and space explaining our decision making process – i.e. our arguments and different points of view – but I have decided to spare you. In fact I did write all that but deleted it. The fact is we have rented a fantastic 2 story 4 bedroom 3 bathroom house in a neighborhood within walking distance of our school. One minor complication though – there is absolutely no furniture. By no furniture I mean there is no refrigerator, no stove, no hot water heater, no air conditioning, not even kitchen cabinets, nothing. We will have to furnish this place completely. We don’t need much so it won’t be that expensive or even time consuming but when we could have rented a fully furnished condo in KL with all the condo facilities like a pool, gym, security, etc it may seem to many like a bad decision. I am sure that for several weeks we will be sitting on mats on the floor listening to tunes on the laptop. We are only committed for 6 months so who knows, maybe we will move into the lap of luxury later. For those of you planning to visit, you can come kick it in a huge house where you can play tackle football inside without worrying or you can wait it out and see if we move. I wouldn’t count on it though.

The house is very cool, in a great neighborhood, conveniently located, and KL is only an hour away. The nearest town is a 15 minute commute and it has all the trappings of a city; malls, movie theaters, restaurants, etc. We window shopped for stuff today and to make the place comfortable it will only cost about $1000-$1500US. I figure in a few weeks we will be styling. Casey is psyched because we are in a totally Malay neighborhood where we will have to speak the language, she can ride a bicycle to work, it is peaceful and quiet and away from the city, there are most definitely monkeys in the trees, and we have absolutely no stuff. I am less excited because I admit, I want to have some stuff. So she gets the monkeys and language immersion, and I get to go to IKEA and the hardware store tomorrow. We move in next week and we will send you pictures of our empty place.

Ben