Proton Wira

This is my Wira. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My Wira is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My Wira, without me, is useless. Without my Wira, I am useless. I must drive my Wira true. I must drive straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me.

All right it is the US Marine Rifle Creed but like the US Marine Corps, Proton produce a lot of machines that all look the same, perform the same and probably kill as many innocent people!

As a car they are rubbish. The one I have as a hire car is an automatic, most are. The only other automatic I have driven for any length of time was a good old JCB (them again). You can guess which has the better acceleration and handling. To be honest the cornering is fun. The tyres screech so easily, they roll on corners to one hell of an angle. Fuel economy is awful, but when petrol is only 30p a litre it is not so bad, though compared to salaries here it is probably nearly expensive as the UK. Petrol prices are set by the government, so it costs the same every where. Instead of putting in your fuel, then paying, it is the other way around here. If you want to fill up, then you have to go up to the cash window and give them far more than it is going to cost, then go and get your change once you have filled up.

The roads are bad in places. Main roads have potholes the size of small communities. They are also very congested. The laws regarding driving seem to be very similar to the UK, they are just not enforced in the same way. It is not unusual to see a whole family on a moped, both adults with crash helmets, but not the kids. Seat belts are only compulsory in the front seats so kids are just loose in the back. Reversing up motorway slip roads, driving down the hard shoulder, in either direction, all seem quite normal here.

All the Motorways, of Highways as the call them, are toll roads. This means the majority of Malaysians do not use them. Toll charges can either be paid in cash or by using a pre-paid card called a Touch And Go. Though Touch And Go works really well, it is no where near as good as the Singapore system.

To drive in Singapore you have to have an Autopass. It is registered to the car not the person, and again is a pre-pay card. It is used to pay all your road tolls, done by an ERP system not toll booths, this is after all Singapore, as well as the tool for using the Causeway or Second Link to Malaysia. Not much different I hear you say. One thing an Autopass allows you to do that a Touch And Go does not, is pay your parking charges so no scrabbling around trying to find change while there a people queuing behind you.

4 months down, 3 to go.....

Well on Thursday I will have been here 4 months, and I could still have 3 to go.

Doing something like this is a big learning experience. Apart from learning a lot at work, you learn a lot about your self. You find what is important to you, you usually know it already, but being away from all that is familiar confirms it.

So, I hear you ask, impart your words of wisdom to us, teach us what you have learnt. You know it already though. Family and friends, they are what is important. Yes it great to live in a nice house and drive a flash car, but they do not keep you company at night. They are not the ones who listen to you moan about work, and as you can guess, I do that a lot. I have the nice place to live here, I don’t have the flash car, more about that another day. So what is the thing I miss most being here in Malaysia??

China Trip

Ni Hou Ma

This all happened very quickly. On Tuesday my boss finds me in the model making workshop and says, “I’m sending you to China” There then follows a short conversation about when and what for. As for the when, maybe as early as Thursday…… So the next day off to Singapore to the Embassy of The Peoples Republic of China to get a visa. Situated right next to the British High Commission, it is a model of communist efficiency. You walk in and collect your application form with your queue number, they make sure you have a photo, if not there is a small room by the desk, well I think that is where you get you photo taken…….

There form is simple, probably more so if you can read Chinese, there is even glue to stick your photo on to the form with. By the time I had filled in the form, I had no more than 5 minutes to wait before my number was called. A quick check of the form, then I was told, “Collect at 3pm”. That was it, I was there no more than 15 minutes.

It was now 10am, what do you do in Singapore for 5 hours. The Embassy is at the end of Orchard Road, the Singapore equivalent of Oxford Street. The problem is, just like Oxford Street, it is full over priced shops all geared toward women.

I flew from Singapore on Saturday 1st July on a Silk Air flight to Shenzhen in China. The flight was nothing special, but considering Silk Air are the low cost branch of Singapore Air, the service was a lot better than BA! I stayed at the Holiday Inn in ZhuHai. It's not quite the same as the Holiday Inn Swindon where our Malaysia Engineers stay when they visit the UK. The one in ZhuHai is a luxury 5* hotel, the one in Swindon is not!

All I really got to see of China is what you could see from the window of a car, or the view from my hotel room. Most of my time was spent in factories over seeing tooling trials and generally trouble shooting. Not very exciting really......

The big difference was the food. Due to the huge size of the country there is a huge diversity n tastes. Unlike th Chinese food we get in the UK, which is mainly Hong Kong style food, the ZhuHai area and that to the north use chillies, lots and lots of chillies. To my hosts I think it was a game, see if they could find something that was too hot. They did not know the training I had been given in Malaysia by my tour guides!


The worst thing about China was the first thing I saw at the airport.........

They get every where. There was one on the opposite side of the road to my hotel, I did not go.