KL Drivers is the Craziest

Greetings from KL.

I am currently in Malaysia with a team doing our "Global Entrepreneurship Lab" Project for B-School. Having a great time in Malaysia working with our host company in Kuala Lumpur. There are 4 teams in Malaysia and over 50 teams spread out doing projects in South America, Africa and Asia.

We spent the first week in Kuala Lumpur. They gave us a nice bear and a hat from the A1 Team Malaysia Racing Team they sponsor (A1 is F1 cars with national teams eg: Malaysia, UK, USA). Here we are in the office with the CTO, our hats and bears.


We flew to Penang on Thursday of last week. Penang is like the Hawaii of Malaysia. I
think I like Penang more, however. There we met up with some great hosts, including the CEO. We worked on the project there for 2 days while enjoying Penang at night. Our hosts took us out to a local hang out at the docks where we enjoyed a wide variety of local foods and beers.
The CEO worked out a stay at the Penang Hilltop Hotel Bellevue which is a hotel on the very
top of a hill overlooking the city of Georgetown, Penang. The hotel owner, like the founders of our host company are all MIT alum.

The road up to the hotel is extremely steep and requires a jeep to get to the top. We met
up with the driver of the 4x4 at a cool colonial-era house in the middle of Penang which
serves as the Hotel's office in the city. There, they had this neat Mini
parked. It was in perfect condition and was pretty neat to see after seeing nothing but Proton Cars (Malaysian cars based on the Lancer) and scooters all week.


After hanging out for a few minutes, we jumped into the Mitsubishi 4x4 SUV and headed up the hill. It was crazy-touge like with monkeys hanging out in the middle of the windy, steep road. The driver had no fear and charged up with the monkeys always jumping out of the way just in time. The driver definitely knew every turn on the climb and we got to the top of the hill in about 10 minutes. There we met up with the CEO and the owner of the hotel and enjoyed an excellent dinner on the hill overlooking Penang.


The next morning, we got up to watch the sunrise and to go for a jog around the hilltop.
The view was amazing and jog up and down the top part of the hill was challenging. There
were some amazing houses on the top of the hill.

Here we are making the MIT sign on the hilltop.



After this, we went back down to the city by a cable-car that is cut into the hill. We spent the day lounging around the pool and checking out the shopping mall before going for drinks in the local hotspot.

The next day after recovering from hangovers, we went to the Feringi beach. I really wanted to rent some scooters to go there, but this got vetoed due to the potential danger of riding on the opposite side of the road with people having a very "loose" interpretation of traffic rules. So instead we hired a driver. At the beach, I sort of made up for the no scooters by renting the highest power Waverunner they had and going full speed for awhile, scaring one of my team members, who was on the back of the Waverunner in her words "nearly to death".



We flew back to KL on Sunday and have been enjoying KL more and more. Yesterday, I even got to see how good the private hospitals are here after getting a clogged ear from swimming and having them fix it in a snap. Last night we got to finally go to the base of the Petronas Towers. Next week, we will have a chance to go into one of the high floors and hopefully through the skybridge.


This weekend, we will be in KL and will hope to make adventures in KL. One thing on the
agenda for me is to visit the Sepang F1 track and to go on the Karting track they have
there. Will put up more pics and stuff soon.

Sorry for the long post. Will try to post less more often. Back to work...