It was my first trip abroad and as excited as I was, never had I expected that a 3-day office conference in Malaysia will become an experience of a lifetime.
On the first day, I was running late for the conference and had to gobble my breakfast. This kind woman, working as a waitress in that hotel came to clean the table when I was finished. Noticing the number of plates she was carrying already, I gathered mine and kept properly on top of the stack. “Are you from India?” She asked. To which I replied yes, we’re here for a conference. She told me that she is from Bangladesh and loves Bollywood. We had a small chat about her move to Malaysia, love for Bollywood and how she had always wished to visit India once. After our brief conversation, we parted ways.
The second day was the time when the roller-coaster ride started (literally). Our adventure began with a visit to Sunway Lagoon, an adventure park where I and my manager bonded over our love for rides. Post that, we went to Pavilion mall near our hotel for shopping. How I wish we were good at remembering directions. A 10-minute walk became around and round circle of 2 hours. Walking around, trying to ask people for directions to our hotel, we bumped into two Germans (a guy and a girl). Very kind-hearted people, who downloaded maps on their phone to help us (our phones didn’t have an international card), they became a part of our journey by offering to walk us to our hotel so they could ensure we were safe. Unfortunately, our hotel was nowhere to be found (even though it said 5 minutes away), an hour went by, but they didn’t leave our side.
Many may think that we should have just done a taxi, *sigh* if only the drivers didn’t refuse to take us. “it’s just 5 minutes away, you can walk, why do you want to waste your 10 ringgits? Is what we got as a reply to whenever we tried to hail a taxi.
It was after 2 hours when a taxi driver agreed to take us to the hotel and turned out our hotel’s location wasn’t correct in Google Maps. They dropped us to our hotel and we said our goodbyes.
People often say that patience and warmth is going away from the world but our sweet incident restored our faith in humanity.
