Where in the World Are We?

by Becky 

Welcome to our family newsletter/blog!  We arrived in Malaysia on Monday, Dec 17th, after a grueling 24 hours of travel, and are happily settling in.  To begin, let me tell you a little about where exactly in the world we are.

Malaysia is located in Southeast Asia, right above the equator. There are two main geographic areas: Peninsular Malaysia, located at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, just south of Thailand, and Eastern Malaysia, located on the island of Borneo, which is shared by Indonesia and Brunei.  Because we are near the equator, the weather is warm year-round, and the days are always the same length.  The sun rises shortly after 7 am, and sets shortly after 7 pm.  

There are two monsoon seasons (rainy seasons) here.  Right now we are in the Northeast Monsoon season which lasts from October to March.  This monsoon originates in China and the north Pacific Ocean and affects mostly the eastern side of Malaysia.  Since we are living on the Western side of Malaysia, we have been only getting a short thunderstorm each afternoon.  The second monsoon season, the Southwest monsoon, runs from April to September.  Maybe we'll see more rain then!

The capital and largest city of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur (“KL” for short) is located on the western side Peninsular Malaysia. The population is about 7.5 million, about halfway in between the size of Boston and New York.  We are living in a small city located about 40 minutes outside of Kuala Lumpur called Cyberjaya. We had our first trip into KL proper this weekend...more on that in another post!

Cyberjaya is a fairly new city which began being developed in the 1990’s with the goal of becoming the “Silicon Valley” of Malaysia. Before that it was mostly palm oil plantations. There are a few universities here. One of them, Multimedia University, was opened in 1999. The town still feels like it is brand new and half empty. Everywhere you look there are buildings under construction.

There are also very few short buildings here in Cyberjaya, it is mostly high-rises. 

There are a lot of foreigners living in our town, especially Koreans. This is because several international companies have offices or factories here, including the company that Holly is working with. I also heard that Korean school kids are on their one month winter break, and that Malaysia is a popular tourist destination for them. That may also explain the high number of Koreans I’ve seen around the neighborhood!

The residential areas seem to be mostly gated communities like the one we live in called “Symphony Hills”. Our neighborhood has both single family attached houses (we live in one), as well as several very tall high-rises. The different sections of our neighborhood are named after composers. We live in “Mozart”:

There are also sections named “Beethoven”, “Schubert”, and “Schumann”. “Verdi” is the high-rise section of the neighborhood, and the pool area is called “The Opera House”. 

Very classy!  I got these pictures off the website for our community.  Buster will be posting our personal pics in his article...coming soon!

Only 60% of the units in our neighborhood are occupied. In fact the entire town feels only 60% occupied. There is a giant shopping center complex close to us that has mostly empty storefronts.

Another funny thing: across the street from us our neighborhood is a private school called “King Henry the VIII”.

We look forward to publishing more posts soon! Please let us know if you have any special article requests.