Malaysia, Day 14: Ipoh

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Ipoh is a chinese-dominated industrial town. It's got an old town and a new town, with the old town being pretty run down and the new town being a wild mixture of well done and badly done places. It has night bazaars in several places, and it has a number of Western style shopping malls. No Starbucks anywhere to be seen.

My desperate search for an Internet cafe brought me to the backroom of a PC shop where I joined a bunch of 10 year-olds, each in front of a PC. While I was telnetting through what felt like a 16.8kbps connection to my ETH Zürich account, the kids where blasting their brains out left and right. More than in KL or Melaka, the youth of this town seems to spend its time in front of simulated slot machines or arcade video games, and if not arcade machines, then networked Internet games. Counterstrike is prevalent here as well, as the kids next to me demonstrated.

I spent most of my day looking around and driving through the various parts of the town, trying to find a number of places, but without much luck. In the end I got bored, so I decided to watch Star Wars Episode 2 in the evening. At least the hawker stall food was ok.

Later, I chilled out on the stunning British-colonial-style veranda of the Majestic, my hotel, overlooking the night market. With a Single Malt in my hand, it would have been perfect, but a bottle of water did as well.

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