Wednesday Night Stories: Merdeka!

Hands down, one of my favorite places I've ever been is Malaysia.

It was warm.

The pineapple was four times better than the tastiest pineapple I've had in America.

And best of all, English is an official language.

In the two weeks, I spent there we spent about 48 hours in Kuala Lumpur, the capital, and while there we struck out to learn some Malaysian history be visiting Merdeka Square, the key site in Malaysian independence.

For a major world city (metro population: 7.2 million), Kuala Lumpur is tiny. You could easily walk across it in the course of an afternoon, but we didn't know that. The city is a conglomerate. There's English and Malay being spoken interchangeably. Street signs will have the script of Chinese, Hindi, and Latin lettering on them. And huge skyscrapers are intermingled with 19th century European architechture and traditional Malay buildings.

It's one of my favorite places I've ever been. So like tourists, a group of 4 or 5 of us grabbed our maps and started walking. We were excited. My friend Amanda was especially excited. Amanda loves history. Amanda loves freedom. Amanda loves America. She feels a special solidarity for any country that similarly escaped British rule and to make matters all the better, the Malaysian flag looks a whole lot like the American flag.

Very exciting times.

After a few minutes, we were similarly excited to stop a stranger and ask for directions (someone who has not lived in a non-English speaking country cannot understand how exciting this was! We could stop ANY random person and ask them for help. And they would understand every word we said! Very freeing!). So we stopped two guys and asked where Merdeka Square was and they repeatedly told us that we would "definitely" want to take a cab.

This is where we learned something about living in equatorial climates. If you live in such a place, you try to move your body as little as possible. So if you have the resources to afford a cab (which he rightly assumed we did), you always take the cab.

So we found a cab and attempted to negotiate a price with the driver who refused to budge citing "bad traffic" and eventually we met his rate.

45 seconds later we arrived at Merdeka Square, with Amanda (who as an American also loves fairness and justice) asking our driver, "Traffic, huh?"

It's part of the price of being a foreigner that I'm more than willing to pay, because we had arrived! We were at the center of Malaysian independence. We walked around. We took pictures for other tourists. We watched some people play cricket (I might have made this part up, but it seems like it happened.) And one of us re-enacted history.

Shockingly, her portrayal is at least somewhat accurate. At the raising of the new, non-colonial flag, the new Malaysian leader did yell, "Merdeka", which means independence, seven times. So you can call it many things, but you can't call it lies.