Another sight we visited on last weeks public holiday is the National Monument. It was sculpted in 1966 by Felix de Weldon. This artist also created the Iwo Jima monument in Washington D.C.. The monument commemorates the Communist defeat in 1950. The monument overlooks the Lake Gardens area, which was set up as a premium living zone for the British elite during the colonial time.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Sights at 06:21 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Starting today at midnight, I will spent the long weekend (the 1st of May is a public holiday here, and since it is on a Sunday, the following Monday is free) travelling to Tioman. Tioman is an island at the eastern coast of Malaysia, and said to be one of the 10 most beautiful islands in the world. I found a few pictures what might expect me here. Guess i will be busy and might not have time to give you live coverage of what i'm doing. But I scheduled some articles to be published on Saturday and Sunday. So you’re still most welcome to visit my page daily

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Daily Life at 05:20 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

Taxi drivers in Malaysia are all sharks. This a generalisation, which is of course not right, but it’s definitely nearer to the truth, than the opposite. First there is none out of a group of ten waiting drivers, who is wanting to driver cheaper than a MYR 20 fixed price. Then we managed to catch one from the road, who afterwards wants to charge an additional MYR 7 because some of the passengers where dropped off before. After some discussion we agree that the driver gets an extra MYR 2, and he is happy because he got some extra money, and I because I got rid of him... Those are things that happen here far too often. Even if you go by taxi by meter drivers are trying to cheat you, for example by going an extra time around the block. Most of the time this is all just about a few Ringgit, which you would give the driver in Europe for a tip... but it’s still tiring to pay attention all the time not to get cheated.

Newest experience (Monday 16th of May)
Getting out of the Bus in KL Puduraya Bus station, there were also several Taxi drivers waiting, wanting to get some customers - to bad that only one taxi was needed, since our singaporean businessman was collected by one of his colleagues. One driver immediately took care of us and said he would drive us to PJ. But i wanted to get 40 MYR / each!! We said that we would be willing to pay MYR 25 for both of us, but we couldn't get his price down to less than 30 MYR/each. So we went to leave for another taxi - on our way back another supposed taxi driver said he would take us for MYR 25, and we finally ended up in a private car, which took us home.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Things to know at 03:40 | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0)

After work Juliane invited us to visit a European restaurant at the Shopping mall “The Curve”, to celebrate her birthday. The shopping mall lays opposite to the only IKEA mall in Malaysia. Since the Moevenpick Marché somehow belongs to Nestlé and has its roots in Switzerland, it offers many different kind of western (European) food. You can choose from the different counters and combine yourself a nice menu.

Juliane did get a gift token for some thing she might want to buy (most probably shoes), and a guide book about bangkok as present, and was very happy

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Daily Life at 17:35 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The Link above "About" is working now. Could have had the idea to link a blog-post with the relevant information before.. thx to Sebastian for editing my template (don't have ftp-access through the Siemens Network ). You can use the comments on "About" as a guestbook, too!

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 11:09 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

I's the 27th of April today, and it's my colleague Juliane's birthday today! To celebrate this event we had a chocolate cake after lunch. Of course I documented everything . You can find the pictures here.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Daily Life at 09:06 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Since I set up this blog page I started only with a few users, who helped me to set up the site and tested the script. I began advertising the page at the partycipate semester warmup party on April 11th since this day the number has increased to a maximum of 115 visits a day (on April 25th). The maximum data transfer was 62.37MB/day so far. Even including the first two weeks (with only very few visitors) I registered an average of 49 visits/day.

I will be very happy if I can keep the page attractive enough to attract an average of 50 visitors/day (at a rate of 1.8 visits/visitor this would mean 90 visits/day). This is far less then some 3000 visits/day Feki.de registers, but for a private page that should be quite an achievement. So please help and visit my page daily

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 03:28 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Blogs get more and more popular. One of the first people i know having one is Jan Schmidt, who is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Bamberg and meanwhile he is back in Bamberg from a a research projekt in Vienna/Austria. Visit his updated blog here.

As I discovered yesterday my friend Nina uses a Blog, to cover some things about here live, too. Visit it here.

Sabine Hohmeier writes about her daily life in Bamberg here.

My friends Markus Lotter, Daniel Teuber, Björn Streicher and Fabian Meier, who are currently spending a year abroad in Sweden have started a blog together. You can read about there adventures in the North here.

My friend Hardi Sukrisman has a blog here.

Currently(?) inactive Blogs

My friend Sebastian Schmelzer uses a blog to cover his experiences doing a internship in a foreign country, too. Hope he'll recover his password soon, that we can read the newest issues from Shanghai here.

Florian Schnappauf also keeps a blog with some information in his stay abroad in Warwick (UK).

Kristina Reetz took a year off, to study at the Appalachian State University in North Carolina. Visit her blog which also is a part of the universities newspage!

Anna Schroiff has a diary about her stay on Skoevde (Sweden), too. Although you got to mail her first to get access, it's worth having a look. She also inspired me with the name of her site: www.anna-in-schweden.de.

Note: I'll add more blogs to this list, when i discover them. So if you have a blog you want to get listed, please drop me a note. (You can easily use the option to write a comment).

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Media at 08:05 | Comments (13) | Trackback (1)