We spent a month and a half in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong - three places which were controlled by the British until relatively recently. In addition to driving on the wrong side of the road, there are still plenty of British cultural influences.
In Malaysia one night, we mentioned to our hosts that we wanted to take a walk. It wasn’t a pleasant place to walk because of the road, so they quickly suggested that we should go to their club instead, which was called Kelab Rahman Putra . It was straight out of “A Son of the Circus” (an excellent John Irving book set partly at a club in India), right down to the bougainvillea. When we drove in, everything switched to English - not Malay and English, just English, although almost everyone there was Asian.
Then on our last night in Hong Kong, we went to Happy Valley racetrack with Ray. I hear that gambling has a longstanding place in Chinese culture, but the track felt very British all the same. It was full of expats, and it was funny to recognize German numbers (the horses were numbered 1 to about 14) in one ear and Mandarin (or maybe Cantonese) numbers in the other ear. It goes without saying that the horses are really fast and that was exciting to watch, although we didn’t bet.
I think the combination of British left-side driving and a lot of tourists and expats severely confused the pedestrian style of Singapore and Hong Kong. I was ready to switch to left-side walking and escalator riding, but, particularly in Hong Kong, there was no pattern. In the MTR they sometimes put arrows on the floor, but they were didn’t stick to one side or the other. These cities are crowded and it is every pedestrian for herself!
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