Singapore is really big, metropolitan, and clean - it's like the nice downtown area of most large cities, except it covers the entire country (Singapore is the city, the country, and the island). The down side of that is that traffic is crazy. Now, I've lived and driven in large cities before (Detroit, Toronto, Fargo, Portland, Seattle, etc.), so I'm not a total n00b, but here, not only are there a lot of cars, but they also seem to ignore lane markings on the road. So, I say PHEW! I'm glad I didn't have to drive myself around.
The other part of my PHEW! is that Customs at the border between Singapore and Malaysia is a lot more rigorous than the US/Canada border. You have paperwork to give them along with your passport on both the Singapore and the Malaysia side. Coming back is the same: paperwork and passport. Thankfully I was with these guys who do this at least once a week, so they had all the paperwork for me to fill out, and they knew all the right lanes to be in. (I said, "PHEW!", right?)
I'll be going through again on Monday and Tuesday, but here's my passport now, stamp-o-icious:
Malaysia is very different from Singapore. The climate is the same, but that's about it. First, the official language there is Malay (Singapore's is English) so all the signs are in Malay - but in roman characters. That means that when you see a sign out of the corner of your eye, you think you should be able to read it, but when you try to sound it out, it just doesn't work out.
Another big difference is that since there is more land in Malaysia, it's not all urbanized. So there are big stretches of palm farms (for the palm seed oil - very cool), small towns, and such. The city I visited was Senai - about an hour and a half drive from my hotel in Singapore. It's got a TON of huge industrial manufacturing sites for large companies whose names you'd recognize (Mitsubishi, Hitachi, etc.).
The non-industrial areas seemed really rural - yet crowded, and not as well kept up (at least on the outside) as Singapore. I say that it seemed not well kept up, but when we went in to one of these little places for lunch, it was very nice.
The people at the site I visited were very nice and accommodating. There was a big sign on their plasma TV that said "XEROX VIP:" with my name on it. It is a massive facility with a ton (literally many thousands of tons) of injection molding equipment, plus a very capable tooling shop. But from here I'll have to leave out the supa-secret, uber-proprietary details of the visit, but I will say that these guys are VERY competent and really great to work with.
While I was at lunch I had a crazy drink called Chendol. It was really funky. It was coconut milk, red beans, brown sugar water slush, and minty green gummy wormy things. It was really sweet (kick you in the teeth sweet) with Lovecraftian textures. Pretty good though.
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