Christmas and New Years 2011 (part 2)

I flew to Kuala Lumpur on December 21st, leaving the cold and rainy weather in Shanghai behind and landing hours later in Malaysia’s tropical heat and humidity. All the shopping malls were decorated with trees and lights for Christmas. Even in a tropical, majority Muslim country, shops make a huge effort to deck the halls with tacky Christmas decorations.

I explored a lot of the city on foot. Although it's very international compared to what I'm used to in Nanjing, it's a small and quiet city. It's pretty compact and has only 1.5 million people, which would put it somewhere between a big town and small city in China.

The coolest part was the diversity of the city. About 60% of the population is ethnic Malay and roughly the same number of people are Muslim. There are also a large number of ethnic Chinese, Indians and other Southeast Asian people, in addition to a good number of tourists. The food, dress and shopping was all very diverse, too. Just blocks away from huge malls with western brands is a Chinatown with restaurants serving familiar cuisines from many parts of China, especially Hainan Island, Guangdong, Hong Kong and other parts of southern China. There are lots of stalls selling knockoff goods, too.

A short walk from the China town is a neighborhood known as Little India. Restaurants serving all kinds of Indian food, gold shops, and bazaars with Bollywood DVDs and housewares. There's even a Burmese and a Nepalese area. It was cool to be able to walk from India to China to Nepal within 20 minutes.

I walked around most of the neighborhoods in the city center and made sure to visit the Petronas Twin Towers. The two skyscrapers overtook the Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower) as the tallest buildings in the world when they were finished in 1998. In person the buildings are underwhelming because they don't seem that tall. They're very skinny and taper at the top. The highest floor is the 88th floor, while the Willis Tower has 108 floors. The Petronas towers are taller because they have tall spires, which are an integral part of the building's architecture thus it counts as part of the building’s height, whereas antennas that are added on for purely functional reasons are not counted when counting the building's height.

My mom and her cousin Patrick Delahunt arrived mid-day on the 24th and we went to an Indian restaurant for a really tasty, all vegetarian meal. The food and Patrick's stories of travelling in India for a month in the early 1990s got us excited to visit India in April this year. After lunch we meandered towards the Petronas towers (I was there early that morning to wait in line for one of the 1000 tickets given out to visit the sky bridge that connects the two towers about midway up. I think I was number 1003 in line and just missed getting a ticket. We had a fun time in the mall at the base of the towers and bought ourselves some Christmas presents -- brightly colored socks from Uniqlo.

We spent our Christmas Eve on a cramped Air Asia flight (the tickets on Air Asia are cheap and you get what you pay for, tiny seats and no free food or drinks). Once we arrived, we got a couple million Indonesia rupiah (it’s just over 9,000 rupiah to the dollar so about US $110 is one million rupiah), and paid $25 for 30-day Indonesian visas.

When we went looking for a taxi, all the taxi drivers said that they didn’t know where the hotel we had booked online was located. They said they didn’t recognize the street and we didn’t have the place’s telephone number. We were exhausted, it was dark and we didn’t know our way around. We’ve got millions of rupiah to spend, just take us anywhere!

We liked the first hotel that were taken to and ended up staying there. By the time we headed out to look for food, it was already past midnight. Most places were closed and after walking up and down the street we discovered that the hotel’s open air restaurant is open 24 hours a day. We had some good Indonesian food and beer there and it ended up being a fun Christmas Eve dinner after all. We went for a dip at 2 AM in the hotel’s swimming pool.

Christmas and New Years 2011 (part 1)

I took off for the Christmas and New Year's holiday on December 20th, first going to Shanghai by train. I went to a seminar directed towards foreigners on the subject of buying property in China. I'm not considering buying an apartment here but I went because an acquaintance was organizing the seminar and I was curious about the topic.

Two things about property in China are striking. First, the prices have risen rapidly over the last decade, as much as 200% in five years in some cities, so there's clearly a bubble. The other feature of the property market that stands out is that since prices have risen so quickly in such a short period of time, the relative cost of housing compared to the average salary is extremely high in China. In Beijing for example, the average home price was $100,000 in 2006, which is 32 years of the average Beijing residents disposable income. By 2011, the average home price had risen to $250,000, while incomes rose more modestly, so the average home would now take the average resident 57 years to pay off

Reasons for the dramatic rise in prices is a cultural preference for owning over renting property, urbanization and a steady movement of people from rural areas to cities, and a lack of other investment opportunities, as the domestic stock market is valued at half what it was when it peaked in 2007, the domestic bond market is small, it's very difficult for Chinese to buy foreign stocks or bonds, and savings accounts pay less than 1% (while inflation is around 5%). That leaves property and some alternative investments like gold, art and collectibles. There aren't many good places for Chinese to put their money.