Day 12: Back to reality

End of study tour

An early start: the alarm woke me up at 5:00, all according to plan. Just slightly woozy I used a satchel of Nescafé in my room to wake me up, packed up the last remaning bits of luggage including the four rechargable devices connected to different outlets all over the room and made my way down to the lobby. There I was greeted warmly by eight students (whose names must remain undisclosed for the sake of privacy) who had just returned from their last nights on the town. In a spirit of comradeship and a cloud of spirits we hugged goodbye. In my state of morning grogginess I almost hugged the single female companion as well, but even a handshake was out of the question here: very much taken aback she did a kind of backwards shuffle to quickly hide out of sight.

Since the pre-ordered taxi and myself were both present way ahead of schedule, there was no reason to dither. A smooth trip to the airport and a time-consuming but unremarkable check-in procedure later, I was sitting behind my last cup of Malaysian coffee (of the black, non-sweetened variety). My left-over Ringgits just failed to stretch to breakfast at airport prices, but that would be catered for quickly enough up in the air.

Up in the air is where I will end this report of the MISC study tour. Those who have read through it diligently enough to reach this point will know that I had a great time, saw a lot, learned a lot. So did our students, who moreover are barely halfway; I only half envy them, at it is also a very intense experience, and more than a little bit tiring. Writing it all up helps fixing it into memory, and if you enjoyed reading this, so much the better!

Day 11: Trains and tastes

Bas Hendrikse

Joyce Pebesma

Dennis Muller

Mart Oude Weernink

Max Kerkers

Let me propose a thought experiment here. Suppose you are a student, in your third or fourth year, and you decide that it would be a cool thing to help organise a study tour. There is a mould for this: study tours have been organised by your study association plenty of times before. You just need a theme and a far-away place to go to, or maybe the reverse: you need a destination and a theme. After a lot of brainstorm sessions with some fellow students crazy enough to stick out their necks together, you settle on "Intelligent and Smart Cities" as a theme, and South-East Asia as target.

All well and good, but now what? How is a city intelligent and smart? Singapore has done your work for you already: they call themselves a "Smart Nation" so the main thing it to find out what they mean by that, and go with the flow. But what about the neighbouring countries, Malaysia and Indonesia? In what sense can their cities said to be intelligent and smart?

When I run this thought experiment in my head (which is the only way you can run a thought experiment) I arrive at the same answer as the OC: smartness lies in education and in infrastructure. Hence I applaud the choice of targets to visit in KL: UniMY and MaGIC for education, the SMART tunnel and (today) RapidRail for infrastructure.

While I'm at it, I also want to acknowledge the tremendous job the OC has done to make it all happen: for the two weeks I have been part of this magnificent experience, there have been no hiccups at all, everything has been brought off without a hitch. If it feels to them (as it probably does) as though they have had to struggle and improvise: yep, I can confirm that that's what it inevitably feels like to organise a major event; the trick it not to let that struggle surface. Which they have managed to achieve admirably well. So there: Joice, Bas, Dennis, Mart, Max: well done!

Ragged around the edges

In contrast, today incontrovertably showed that not all participants have been doing as well. This morning when it was time for the bus, two of them who shared a room had not shown up and did not respond to attempts to wake them up. Nor were they the only ones starting to look ragged around the edges. As for myself, despite a short night I felt quite ready to absorb whatever this last day would bring my way.

One thing it brought was rain. I had started to take it for granted that it would not rain at all, but as in Singapore, our last day in Kuala Lumpur proved otherwise. In this case that was mostly a blessing, as the heavier rain had fallen during the night (I vaguely remembered thunder) and now the temperature had cooled down at least five degrees.

Maybe because of the vestiges of rain, the traffic was so jammed that for once our early start brought us to our destination, the headquarters of RapidRail, just in time. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for our hosts, so those of us in need to do so could catch up on another 15 minutes of sleep, seated in yet another presentation (or sharing?) room, waiting for the show to begin.

Lecture at RapidRail

It began with a propaganda-like video on the joys of public transportation, followed by another, more informative video on the construction of a new railway due to be opened soon. The speaker from Prasarana (the mother company of RapidRail) then expanded on this, listing an impressive number of projects that were either recently finished, due to be finished soon, or underway. When it's all done, the train capacity will have increased by hundreds of thousands of passengers daily; this surely cannot but help to improve the traffic situation hugely. The amount of money involved is impressive too: where I thought that 2 billion RM for yesterday's SMART tunnel was actually not that bad, the 30 billion RM quoted for just one of the new train lines was enough to make me blink. Palm oil must be booming!

Rail lines old and new

What we actually had come for, though, was the fact that the trains on some or all of these lines are or will be driverless. Neither the video nor the presenter had stressed this point at all. When asked about it, it seemed as though there is little to be said: driverless yes, autonomous no, the whole operation is remotely controlled from the headquarters building where we sat. No intelligence in the trains themselves at all, they will not even brake if there is an animal on the tracks. That problem was waved out of existence by saying that the tracks were pretty much out of reach. As for cybersecurity, we got the same answer as yesterday: this is a closed system, not connected to the internet, so no problem. Plus, the communication between concrol center and trains is conducted through the electrical system, not an electronic network. Of course none of us are electrical engineers, so we were not in a position to judge the claim that there was no way to intercept or spoof messages sent this way.

After the presentation we were offered "refrshments", meaning once again a hot meal - and this at 11:00 in the morning. Any thought of lunch obliterated, we were led to a viewpoint from where we could overlook the control room. The setup was pretty similar to the one at the SMART tunnel yesterday. All of it was brand new and spic and span. The operators had about 6 screens each, which did evoke some jealousy among the students; however, the thought of watching those screens for shifts of 8 hours on end did a lot to erase that feeling again. I think you need to inject some fake emergencies from time to time, just to keep everyone alert. But that's psychology, another field that none of us are expert in.

Workshop

The last stop was a workshop. By some this was interpreted as a chance to switch to active mode and do something ourselves, like the Blockchain workshop on the very fist day in Singapore. That was quite far from reality though: here we were led to a mechanical workshop where the trains were maintained and repaired. Such large pieces of hardware are always impressive; it's an aspect that is largely missing from our field of study. That lack dectracts from the appeal of computer science to outsiders: typically it starts being interesting only when you hook up a computer to something that moves, such as a robot or maybe a train. So it was nice to be able to walk around and under the trains, even though it added little of value for the purpose of this visit. The conclusion must be that the public transport infrastructure in Kuala Lumpur, though very new, is not very modern, relying rather on tried and trusted technology from decades ago. Which I'm not disparaging: tried and trusted technology may be just the ticket for trains.

Driverless train

I did ask about the non-functional equipment we had noticed on the train line from Batu Caves on Monday, only to be told that that line was not operated by Prasarana. Nice save!

The very final event was the inevitable group picture. You would have thought that by now we had settled on a default arrangement where everyone know his place, but not so: we always wander around pretty aimlessly until everyone is in a position where they can see the camera. The routine on the other side is strikingly similar each time: one-two-three... click... one more... now a silly one!

It was a good thing that we had had what amounted to an early lunch, for the next and last item on the agenda was a food tour through Kuala Lumpur starting at 14:30. This left an hour for catching up on sleep. For once, we did not take our own bus but rather the monorail directly in front of the hotel, which is one of the lines that is operated by Prasarana. Sadly, it must be said that here, too, the functioning of the electronic displays left much to be desired: they were stuck on one station and hence worse than useless.

Fish paste, to be fried into keropok leko

Colourful and unknown fruits

Rambutan

Unfamiliar habits

Unfamiliar snacks

The food tour was run by a team of three ladies that took us via a number of restaurants and a large food market of the type you would hesitate to visit on your own: narrow walkways, unknown habits and mores. Along the way were were shown and got to taste many types of food and food ingredients. They have so many fruits and vegetables that I had never heard of and that I'm sure are impossible to get back in the Netherlands! I remember only a few of them: the rambutan (family of the lychee), the dragonfruit, the jackfruit and of course the durian; and on the vegetable side, the petai that I happened to have tasted just the day before. Also  murtabak passed by, as well as krupuk tapioka (I learned that the stuff we call krupuk in the Netherlands is actually just a type of krupuk, namely krupuk udang, for shrimp), as well as many more snacks and dishes whose names I did not catch or remember. We also learned about using your fingers as utensils while eating: there are special provisions for washing your hands before and after, and a proficient finger eater does not mess up his/her hands above the second knuckle. I could not bring myself to try it out though: table manners too ingrained, and my taste for new adventures was running out with the end of my trip closing in.

At one point we were filled to capacity not just with information but also with food, but on we still went to a next restaurant, until after regular dinner time. I have noticed that the food here is less filling than ours; nevertheless, there does exist a point after which you've just had enough.

To get back to the hotel, the monorail would have been the obvious choice, but the students have all acquired a taste for uber and most of them preferred to go that way. Never having used that service, I joined a group of three of them who had summoned a car, to see it in operation. Not a good first experience, as it turned out: the car was very slow in coming, just standing still for at least ten minutes (which you can track live via the app). There was no apparent traffic jam. You have to rate the trip afterwards and this driver got negative marks; the wish to avoid that is what is supposed to keep drivers on their toes. We did get to the hotel in the end, though so much later than the monorail group that they were not even there to ridicule us any more.

Given the time and my early start back home tomorrow, I decided to skip the foretold drinks in Petronas Tower 3. Been there, done that. Instead it was goodbye to the group, get the suitcase packed, set the alarm and... one, two, three... click.

Day 10: Of tunnels and rock bottoms

SMART

A double visit today: the SMART tunnel followed by the MAGIC startup hosting facility. Neither of which meant more to me than they will to you when you first read this, but bear with me and I'll explain.
The SMART tunnel is a smart solution to a problem that is pretty unique to KL. The city is located in the Klang valley; the Klang is a rain river. This means that during the wet season it is liable to flood the streets and cause appreciable damage and inconvenience. To compound matters, there's a second river flowing into the Klang (the Ampang) which behaves likewise. A third river, the Kerayong, shares the same basic properties but, flowing west of the city where the area is not so densely settled, has sufficient space for overflow and water storage. Half of the smartness comes from digging a tunnel that lets the superfluidity of eastern river water cross the city underground and drain into the western river, whence it can continue safely on its way.

The second half of the smartness has to do with traffic congestion. Though not quite as bad as Jakarta, where we were told people actually died in their cars during a 24 hour total gridlock not too long ago (which in itself will certainly not have helped in the resolution of that congestion), KL still suffers from major clogging of the arteries. Realising that the same connection that would drain the water east-west a number of times a year could also drain some of the traffic, in an unprecedented spirit of creativity and (I think) level of risk-taking, the KL government decided that two problems could be solved at one stroke: one and the same tunnel could be used for both water (when necessary) and traffic (when not)!

Maquette of tunnel and town

Hence SMART: Stormwater Management And Road Tunnel. (The acronym in itself deserves a prize.) It can be either closed for water and open for traffic, or open for both (the traffic goes via two lanes above one another in the top half, the water flows below), or open for water only (through the traffic lanes as well). There is also a "completely closed" mode for two days after mode 3, at which point they clean the traffic lanes: although every effort is made to sift debris from the water before it enters the tunnel, and the incline is designed to be such that the flow rate ensures the water carries most of the fine silt with it, we were treated to an introductory film showing both the flooding itself and the cleaning process: this is water bearing a surprising resemblance to the white coffee they serve here.

Someone put a lot of loving work into this...

The whole thing is a superb feat of engineering, in operation for a decade now. It has been co-financed by the government and a private company; the latter had born the extra cost of the road system and is now running that operation, earning their money back through tolls. They were the ones actually receiving us. Mode 2 (both water and traffic) has been used about 200 times during that period, mode 3 (water only) about 7 times - the last of which was in 2012. But of course our group was primarily interested in the computer science aspects of SMART; and after yesterday's emphasis on security, also that side of it. In the Netherlands this has been a bit of a sore point for the last 5 years or more: several new tunnels have suffered severe delays in opening because their automation was not up to par, and there have been a number of temporary bridge closures for the same reason. These infrastructural projects are all about concrete; the fact that softwarel has become a major factor these days has not yet sunk in properly.

Tada! The control center

It was a very neat trick that after the promotional films and a nice complementary presentation by a very competent speaker, the curtains behind the screen opened and we looked directly down into the control center itself, with a huge walls of CCTV screens with live feeds of the traffic in various tunnel sections, a schema depicting the whole system and indicating potential problems and congestion, and a number of operators behind screens with the job of watching it all. This engendered more questions about the computer-related aspects of the system. The main claim to (cyber)security is that the whole system is not connected to the internet, and that the safety-critical subsystems are connected by a wired netwerk. No Internet of Things for SMART! I wonder if the same would be true if they would design the system now rather than over a decade ago.

QA time

I also was interested to learn that the speaker, when asked about this, had no doubt that the absence of mode 3 floods since 2012 was a consequence of climate change: in fact, he explained that the whole storm pattern had shifted to later in the year and less severe here; on the other hand, there have been recent typhoons in Korea and Japan.

MaGIC entrance

The second visit of the day was to MAGIC, another clever acronym that stands for MAlaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Centre. What they do is help startups by offering them office space, giving them advice on marketing, bringing them in touch with investors, offering courses on how to run a business, and suchlike. After the by now well-rehearsed lunch routine we were received in a brand new, spacious building in Cyberjaya, a modern industrial area that has sprung up to the south of KL, next to Putrajaya. The order of business was the reverse from all previous visits, possibly because the main speaker was not yet there: we were first shown around the quarters. This might have worked well had our guide not been much too soft-spoken to make herself heard to the entire group, and had there not been people seriously trying to get some work done in the offices. What we did see, and prepared us for what we were afterwards told by the main speaker, was that all of it was shared space and that sharing experience and other forms of community effort were positively expected of the startups taking part in the program.

Jowynne

The speaker, Jowynne Khor, a charming, very serious young woman, explained that the Malaysian prime minister had been inspired by the success of Silicon Valley (who hasn't?) and  wanted to create a Malaysian version of that. Every year a certain number of applicants were accepted in their program, were expected to work together and (again) share their experiences. Every year, a subset of them were invited for a trip to the real Silicon Valley to learn how things were done there. She also explained about the "core values" of magic, which included some unexpected phrases not directly reminiscent of how the Americans do things, such as "celebrate diversity", "create happiness" and, the most beautiful, "be humble". When I asked her about this afterwards, she stated that, yes, this was an intentional, culture-inspired diversion from the American practice (which of course preaches just the opposite), the Asian culture being more of a "serving nature" (her words).

Public board showing startup status

We then heard brief presentations from representatives of three startups currently supported by the MaGIC program:

• A web site for selling your old car to a dealer through a bidding system. The presenter seemed to know what he was doing and what the selling point of his system was. Fun fact: a car here costs as much as it would in the Netherlands, whereas other costs (obviously food but also fuel prices) seem to be a fraction. You wouldn't say that after having taken a look at the traffic in KL. At SMART this morning we learned that a toll of 3 RM (about 70 cents) is reason enough for many to avoid the tunnel; that suggests that actually owning a car should be out of reach as well.
• A would-be consultant for Blockchain. Rather unexpectedly, this was a German living in Malaysia, who certainly gave the impression of being technically very competent, but also rather bluntly said, when asked, that he wasn't looking for more than a one-man operation. That may have been wise on his part, as he certainly didn't impress me as a person with whom it would be easy to cooperate. He did have confidence for two though.
• A graphical domain-specific language with tool support for hooking up Internet-connected devices quickly and painlessly. This was presented by a rather shy guy who had brought a demo installation as well as his ten-year-old son (might have been even younger) to run the demo for him. It was kind of sweet, but he had a lot to learn about presenting his ideas. I would have liked to talk to the pair afterwards, but they were not to be found. I think that here was the clearest case of someone technically competent with close to zero entrepeneurial skills.

MaGIC rules

At the University of Twente we have the Kennispark, an incubator for startups with which the university cooperates quite closely. Clearly they have chosen a different model here, but through we learned something about the differences and the reasons behind them, it is almost impossible to grasp how things work here or are supposed to work, without living and working here for a while. It is possible that they are still groping around in the dark, but equally possible that they are sitting on a goldmine.

The afternoon was concluded with the words "it was a good sharing", entirely in the spirit of everything we had heard. Come to think of it, at UniMY we had also be thanked for "the sharing" rather than for "the visit" or "the presentations". Fascinating.

Obama Oval

On the way out, we were told that the grass field in front of the bulding, which we had seen a solitary person meticulously and very slowly mowing all afternoon using a hand mower, even though it looked neat enough to start with, was called the "Obama Oval" as the building had been officially opened by the American president on a visit to Malaysia. They had pictures to prove it and a sign to commemorate it. I can certainly understand that they are proud of this!

Khadijah's

The evening was shown as "free time" on the official study tour program, but an initiative had been developed since then to book a pub crawl. Hilarious in a way, since pubs and clubs have been crawled every single night by our enterprising tour participants; I would have said there is little crawl space left. In any case, I had already made a dinner arrangement with Imran Nordin, friend of Chris Poskitt, so I missed the chance to go crawling with them on this last full night of my stretch of the tour. Possibly just as well.

At 18:00 I was picked up by Imran; that is, true to form he was held up by traffic for 15 minutes, after which I realised (having learned my lesson yesterday evening) that my casual attire might be too casual for some places and went back to my room to change into something more universally acceptable; so a culturally appropriate 25 late we drove to the Malaysian dining place Imran had picked for us, a bit outside the center. During the ride I expained the purpose of our tour and told about the visits we had paid; Imran, who works at the National University of Malaysia, expressed surprise at our choice of UniMY as destination. I received the strong impression that we would also have been quite welcome at his institute.

Khadijah's

We had a wonderful selection of Malaysian dishes at Khadijah's, a restaurant owned by a famous Malaysian lady singer, Khadijah Ibrahim. Besides rice with a choice of chicken, beef and fish curries, this included "stinky beans" or petai by way of a salad. Green stuff has not been a regular ingredient of our meals, but though the petai does not really stink and is more interesting than the horse bean which it otherwise resembles, I will not place it very high on my list of favourite foodstuffs.

Park and fountain

Petronas Twin Towers

Imran then proposed to get a drink downtown, at a skybar on top of Tower 3, with a great view of the iconic KL twin towers. While driving there he expanded the name to Petronas Tower 3, which rung a bell: something had been said earlier about MISC visiting a bar in the Petronas tower tomorrow night. The number 3 derives from the fact that the twin towers are fully named Petronas Twin Towers and so account for numbers 1 and 2. Petronas is the Malaysian national oil and gas company. Well, they probably wouldn't blame me for doing a little preparatory investigation, so up we went to floor 57.

I would not have gotten far in shorts here! Bellhops opened doors and pointed the way to the next elevator; it took three of those to reach the correct height. There we were met with loud music, great views (as promised) and the most expensive drinks menu I have yet seen. I think that every floor must have added about 20 sen to the price of an arbitrary item, with the end effect that 1 beer could get you back and forth through the SMART tunnel for about a week. Imran told me that most of it is taxes. There is one duty-free island off the coast of Malaysia where scenes can be found comparable to those on Scandinavian ferries. As an ethnic Malaysian he is by law a muslim and hence not allowed to partake; as a graduate of the University of York he is not averse to a pint; it makes for a double life which did not sound comfortable to me.

Mexican Head Hunter

After a couple of rounds culminating in a Mexican Head Hunter, served in a fascinating contraption with three smouldering incense sticks that could not fail to almost enter your nose upon taking a sip, I called it a night. Only to be persuaded, without too much of a struggle, that this last full night in KL should be exploited more fully. As Fate (or some other deity) we found a Mexican place without a 57 floor surcharge in a street where clearly much of the KL night life occurred. This was confirmed when an inspection of the group app revealed that the pub crawl had progressed to a bar exactly next to ours!

Rock Bottom

With so much fate in the air, obviously we could not not join them. After a short intermission where Imran explained the working of the foodstall across the street, the equivalent of the Dutch "muur" (take a stick of anything for 1,50 RM and boil it) we moved over to the Rock Bottom, where we were made welcome by the 10 or so students who had survived the pub crawl up until this point. I was glad to see that one of them, Luc Jansen, fell into a conversation with Imran: with different blood groups you can never be sure how well they mix. Later, when the music gradually got too loud for talking, we did quite a bit of dancing. Imran demonstrated that he was the best dancer of us all. A glorious way to start my last full day of study tour!

Day 9: All secure

Today's program started only in the afternoon. It consisted of a visit to the KL branch of F-Secure, a world-wide company specialised in malware detection and preventive security measures. I am not an expert in this area, but they seem to be one of the major global players in the field. They have a call center and customer care service here covering not just Malaysia but some of the surrounding region as well; but more importantly for our purpose, some of their R&D is also located here.

Secure door

Getting there was another case of time misjudgement: after having pulled the start time back from 12:45 to 12:20, we arrived more than an hour early at our destination. Light grumbling again. Nothing for it but to wander around among the local coffee and lunch places, a cut up here from most we have seen before; we were clearly in an affluent business district.

At F-secure, we were treated to a presentation which essentially amounted to a lecture about cybersecutiry that would do very well in any university course on the subject. It was delivered by a guy who called himself Calvin. We rarely get to learn names of the presenters, and when we do, they often call themselves by nicknames or anglicised versions of their name, to make life easier for the western tongue. I am not sure I would follow that line if our roles were reversed, names being such an important part of identity; but then, we tend to give more weight to identity than they do here.

The world is a grim place through the eyes of a malware specialist. Threats are everywhere, to every measure there is a countermeasure, no defense remains unbreached on the world wide web. Trojan horses, backdoors, worms and honeypots, spearphishing, ransomware and watering holes: all inventive, cute-sounding terminology for branches of cybercrime. The Internet of Things, presented by the propaganda machine of Singapore so lovingly as the solution to problems we never had in the first place, was now portrayed as a sleeping dragon of potentially disatrous proportions, already responsible for the most massive DDoS attack in history. Kind of scary, really; indeed, Calvin confessed to have developed a healthy degree of paranoia.

Waiting for the presentation to start

The thing is, there is so much money to be made to bring the next cool gadget to the market that developers simply do not take the time to program their new devices properly and make sure they are error-free and secure. I think that only a major disaster might bring it home to the general population that we really need better business practices. Even the almost weekly reports of hacked services (LinkedIn, Yahoo, revenue servies, banks) with sometimes hundreds of millions of stolen identities as a result haven't made a sufficient impact. Personally I believe that compulsory certification is the only way to go. We don't let unsafe electric devices onto the market; why do we accept insecure electronic ones?

Presenters (Calvin to the right)

I later overheard a student say that he thought it was all rather generic and we didn't hear much that was new or learn a lot about the company. I think that's only partially true: there were a lot of anecdotes from the point of view of F-secure, as well as recent trends and events. Moreover, in a nice change from many previous visits, there was a proper QA session afterwards where answers were provide quite frankly. (Unlike for instande at the UniMY, where a student clearly (and maybe predictably) found the question which course she liked best impossible to answer with so many of her teachers in the room. The message that Calvin stressed the most though was a very general one, namely: take care of your passwords. Use strong ones and renew them; don't rely on third-party identification services such as facebook and google since they endanger your privacy; and use a password manager if you can't keep track yourself. I'm using one of these myself nowadays and I can confirm it is very convenient, not least because it also makes me realise the number of different accounts I actually have, which starts to approach a hundred. (I'm sure that this number is not actually very impressive among computer science professionals.)

After the presentation we were led one floor up, to where the customer care service was located. Though it complemented the story well, in itself this was not so informative: people behind screens are a common sight. There was a screen on the wall with a world heat map of the latest detected incidents, on which Batu Caves was ranked rather high. There was opportunity for some more questions, but the situation with us standing around the tables and people working there was not very conducive to an extended session. So it was soon back to the bus and to the hotel.

Drift dining

This time there was an evening programme: dining with the Organising Committee and the two supervisors. Those two were by this time not the same as we had started out with: Luís has flown off on Tuesday morning, coincidentally also to Indonesia where the students are flying on Saturday, for a couple of university visits in his capacity of director of education for Business and IT. This afternoon his replacement had arrived, Rudy Oude Vrielink, a lecturer in that study programme. These two days I have had to do the hard job of keeping the students under control all by myself. A good thing I don't actually have that job, so the question whether I succeeded or failed does not have to be asked, let alone answered.

Malaysian Irish coffee

The OC had selected Drift Dining, a restaurant serving the most Western European-style cuisine I have seen here, before or after. While I'm writing this I realise that Naughty Nuris falls into the same category, but that place did not feel western despite offering an utter pork fest; here they really went for the elegant and expensive look and feel, with large wine glasses on the table and prices at least five times what we had been paying the night before. Good for variety, to be sure, and also quite well-prepared, but after two weeks I am not yet desperate for a taste of home and would have been happy to explore variety within the Asian cuisine. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I would be at a loss to explain the differences between the dishes from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Myamar, Vietnam, Cambodia and India, all of which can be found here without looking hard. I omitted the Chinese and Japanese kitchen from this list because I like to think that those are different enough for me to notice, but it is more than likely I'm fooling myself even there, if only because there is no single definition of, say, "the" Chinese kitchen - how could there be, in a country as large as and more populated than all of Europe? In the Netherlands, one Chinese restaurant is much like the next (and very few of them are properly Chinese, most of the owners having originated from Indonesia, or so I have been told) but seen from here the diversity is much more visible.

Getting into the Helicopter pad: no shorts, no sandals!

So as not to leave Rudy with the idea that he had just had a typical taste of Malaysia, we relocated to the Helicopter Pad nearby. This place, which I had heard the students talk about, is as its name suggest an actual helicopter landing place on top of one of the large towers, but in the nighttime serves a second purpose as a bar. Though "only" 40 or so stories high, it offers great views over the much higher landmark towers of KL (in particular the mast-like KL tower and the connected twin Petronas towers). We had some trouble getting in because we were in our casual attire, whereas the bar wanted to admit only long trousers and shoes. After invoking the manager and claiming - truthfully - that friends of ours were already up there, they brought forth some fashionable overtrousers and temporary footwear that made us acceptable, and up we went on the remaining flights of stairs to enjoy the views and a few beers or cocktails.

Petronas towers as seen from the Helipad

KL tower as seen from the Helipad

With the mood thus mellowed, we made a final stop-over at a more regular ground-level bar, until the music was turned up too loud for conversation and it was hotel time once more, at least for me. Rudy kept up quite well, having had a good night's (or day's) sleep on the plane.

Day 8: Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat

Chicken ham and beef bacon

This is the day that the program starts repeating, at least to some degree: in the morning we are visiting another embassy, in the afternoon another university. A nice opportunity to compare Singapore with Malaysia.

One item in that comparison is the hotel breakfast. Where in Singapore I described this as adhering to world-wide blandness, here in KL we have gone almost fully native. The only concession to stomachs not used to rice or noodles in the early morning is white bread, a toaster and lumps of butter, plus eggs prepared differently every day. Unless, that is, you consider baked beans breakfast fare (inherited from the British?) or include creative inventions such as beef bacon or chicken ham.

Residence of the Dutch embadsador in KL

Another difference is our daily mode of transportation. Here, there is no question of using public transport to get to where we are going. There is actually a monorail passing directly in front of the hotel, but we are not so lucky as to have a destination close to one of the other stations. Anyway, since we have rented a bus complete with driver and guide for the entire duration of our stay, it is only natural to use it; and there is the pleasant side effect that we arrive at our destinations unsweated.

In the morning it was embassy time. We were received at the residence of the embassador, by the second in charge as before: Jurriaan Middelhoff, head of the economic department. As before in SG and in fact as throughout much of history, we Dutch are mainly interested in economic ties. We learned that though Malaysia trails behind Singapore in terms of economic importance to the Netherlands, the distance is not that big, and it actually outstrips Indonesia - a fact that is not reflected in the sizes of the respective embassies, as Jurriaan explained with some envy. Population: 50 million; main export: palm oil. Ethnically a mixture of autochthonous Malaysian - for the most part muslim - Chinese and Indian (immigrated in British times). Few racial conflicts until fairly recently, when the government started to systematically apply positive discrimination in favour of the Malaysian. System of government: a kingdom where the crown rotates over the sultans of the constituent states, which came together into the federation of Malaysia in order to get their independence (Singapore having dropped out after the fact).

Malaysian-Dutch Business Council

We were also assured that Kuala Lumpur is not really unsafe, contrary to what we were told before. In fact, when we inquired about it, Jurriaan immediately inferred that we were warned in Singapore (which was correct) and claimed that KL was not less safe than Amsterdam. This does jibe with our own observations: the city is busy and mostly ugly, but does not feel threatening. I'm sure that there are less savoury neighbourhoods, but we will not go looking for those.

Jurriaan then played tag with Bart, representing the Malaysian-Dutch Business Council. They are a kind of Chamber of Commerce for their members, who consist of medium and large Dutch companies with offices in Malaysia. He confirmed the economic importance of Malaysia to the Netherlands, and also that there is a lot of opportunity for growth. Another sneer in the direction of Indonesia. I found myself wondering how objectively correct the picture is that was painted for us. If there is truth in it, then the study tour is stepping down on the ladder of developed countries, and it may make sense for the University of Twente to look more towards Malaysia for exchange and collaboration programs than we are right now (currently Singapore and Indonesia are high on the list, but as far as I know Malaysia is pretty much absent).

Shopping mall with food court/hawker center

After the fairly brief presentation session we were treated to some more watery coffee, then it was back to the bus for a visit to UniMY, the University of Malaysia for Computer Science and Engineering. Partially because of the brief duration of our embassy visit, we once more had plenty of time to spare. This is indeed a pattern: the schedule allows for major traffic jams that so far have not materialised. When this is at lunchtime, it just means we can hunt for coffee after finding a good lunch. I have not had or heard any complaints about the food: you very soon realise that lunch is the same kind of fare as dinner, and typically we are at a food court (the kind of place Chris called a hawker center) where there is plenty of choice, prices are low and quality high. Coffee, however, is amother matter (as is tea): they sweeten it to an insane level, only a very desparately coffee-deprived European can drink that stuff. The up to an hour of spare time ahead of the first visit of the day has caused some grumbling from those who think a better place to spend that time is in bed.

Sander Giesselink in the merry-go-round

In a way we are combining the worst features of our own culture's way to deal with scheduling, which is to say, strictly, and that of our host country, which is definitely on flexible time, as I got confirmed just this morning by an intern at the embassy. To make absolutely sure we are on time, because of the unpredictable traffic we have to build in large buffers which in practice cause us to be early. By the Malaysians themselves, on the other hand, the problem of unpredictable traffic is met by not minding too much that a meeting is delayed by as much as an hour; so they may actually be late themselves (though that hasn't to us happened so far). I think the solution would be for us to adapt flexible time scheduling ourselves and just take the risk of being late; but that is a very difficult decision to make, since it goes against our cultural grain. Also, in the end, just being on the safe side is not that costly since it is just for a few weeks: the grumblers just have to deal with it, and could easily regulate their sleep in the old-fashioned (but boring) way of going to bed on time.

In this particular case we had enough time for Sander Giesselink to collect 2RM worth of coins and take a ride on the merry-go-round meant for people a quarter his age and length. Fortunately the thing continued going round merrily.

Welcome at UniMY

At the UniMY (full name: university of Malaysia of computer science and engineering) we were received with open arms. There was a large group of staff and some students present to welcome us, and we finally got to do the full range of presentations from our side. I think we would have been welcome to show more, but that is hard to judge in advance. From their side we learned that this is an even younger establishment than USTD, having been established in 2012. So far there is only a BSc program; they are due to start with MSc and PhD programs from 2017 onwards. More important to understand this establishment, however, is something that I learned only later and was left more or less implicit during their presentations, namely that this is actually a "private", in other words, non-government-sponsored, university: they are funded by a conglomerate of IT-industries. (The presenters used the term "boutique university", which might, with hindsight, have been a much more elegant word for the same thing.) Though there is certainly nothing wrong with this in principle (witness the many excellent private U's in the US), it is a different model than for a public university, and as little the standard here as in the Netherlands. One thing you certainly have to look out for is (the suggestion of) a conflict of interests. The UniMY has therefore taken the probably wise step of having the University of Melbourne monitor them for quality of the research and educational program.

Their lack of age and tradition showed up in many aspects, but they made up for it in enthousiasm. Two UniMY researchers presented their work: it was evident that they had been attracted from neighbouring fields, computational chemistry and biology. If they are representative of the staff, it might be some time before they have put together a more or less standard curriculum. Then again, there are currently only 200 students and 30 staff; a luxurious ratio, enabling a very personal supervision. The reason why we were so warmly welcomed was also because this is the first ever visit of this kind, they were sort of surprised that we had found them in the first place. I asked the OC later how the contact was made. They have started top-down, by first getting in touch with the Malaysian version of the national IT branch organisation; they were then connected through to Dr. Dan, the most effusively friendly of our hosts. She had in fact also helped further by bringing the OC in touch with F-secure, the company we're scheduled to visit tomorrow.

Representative of the Student Representation Council (in uniform)

After the presentations, I had to redirect a gift from our host to be presented to Joyce instead: the message that the students were really in charge hadn't sunk in completely. A sequence of interviews was then held with organisers, a supervisor (yours truly) and a participant, for publicitary purposes. I wonder how well we have been able to get across the alien principle of a study tour. While this was going on, the rest of the group received a tour around the building, which I had to miss; followed by "refreshments" of the same kind as at USTD, which is to say, consisting of food enough to cover dinner and coffee sweet enough to satisfy a year's dietary requirements. I almost missed that part, as after the interview I decided to try and decrease the queue of unanswered emails in my inbox and was subsequently accidentally left behind. I was discovered just in time to try some of the green pancakes (which turned out to be harmless enough) and sate (delicious). I also chatted with the staff, found out they are very open to the idea of student exchange, and also that most of those whom I had taken to be students were actually staff members. The large majority was female, and we had already learned that the same holds for the student population; a fact that is strange to our male-dominated student landscape - at least in the technical studies, including computer science. They are actually as unhappy with this lack of gender diversity as we are. It is a phenomenon that is known also in the southern European countries. I have read that there is a correlation with the lack of perceived status and ensuing lack of macho or nerd culture.

Green pancakes (pandan)

Another striking thing was the abundance of head coverings and scarves. This is of course more easily explained: ethnically Malaysian students are favoured, and they are muslim by law. (That last bit is not what the embassy had told us, who maintained that there is a minority of non-muslim Malay; it is a trivium, if that is the right word, I learned from the mouth of one of them a few days later.) But it must be said that the impression you get here about this ubiquitous dress code is quite different from what it appears like in the Netherlands: the girls are very lively and open, dress fashionably with pretty and decorated scarves, have no compunction about shaking hands. Observing this it is clear that, by choice, by culture (it is probably just as superficial to equate middle-east and far east islam as it is to equate northern Europe and southern American christianity) or by being forced into that particular box, the average Dutch muslim is quite a bit more severe than the average Malaysian one.

Tg's Nasi Kandar at a panic-free time

There was a collective dinner planned. To my surprise and slight chagrin, out of the hundreds of restaurants in KL we landed at Tg's Nasi Kandar, the exact same place I had found myself yesterday. Eating there with 28 healthily hungry Dutch, however, turned out to be a different type of deal than for a solitary one, and engendered total chaos. It would have been funny to watch had we not been really hungry. One lady who seemed to be in charge came to take our orders table by table, but when it came to delivering them the myriads of waiters seemed to have no clue how to match up the dishes with those who had ordered them. Dishes were brought to one table, taken to another on the command of the boss lady, and then returned to the open kitchen, from where we could hear a lot of shouting and see running around. This was aggravated more than a little by the fact that there was no alcohol to be had and so everyone ordered fresh fruit juice (mango, watermelon, banana, orange, or various mixes of those and others) by the pint; delicious though this turned out to be, making one of them was almost as time-consuming as cooking the food, and the confusion was even larger. Long after everyone had eaten, some had not yet received their drinks, whereas others were on their second or third round. Waiters arrived with one drink or another, stood for a while, and disappeared again when no-one spoke out to say that he wanted what they had to offer.

Drinks promo

The food was as good as yesterday. I had myself a portion of lamb-and-cheese murtabak, on the suggestion of Chris back in Singapore: a kind of thick pancake stuffed with meat paste, one of the typical regional dishes. The mango-and-banana juice went down well with that. I don't think I had banana juice before, I would have said that bananas can't be juiced. It's kind of frothy and, as one would expect, quite filling. When I ordered a second glass they had run out of bananas, unfortunately. I have read that there is a world-wide shortage of bananas as they seem to have fallen victim to disease, though in the Dutch supermarkets there is still a steady supply.

After dinner  (which set us back a whopping 750 RM for the entire group, almost 7€ per person, drinks included) the students got ready for another night on the town, but I felt more like some solitary hours after this busy day, so I went and had a couple of Tigers on my own, with my head behind a laptop screen again. It was a short walk back to the hotel for some well-earned rest.