Saturday, November 16, 2013

Back From the Dead

It took a while for the will to live to return to my food poisoned body. Between hurried trips to the bathroom I spent most of a day in the hotel curled up on the bed in a shivering ball waiting to either get better or die. Eleanor kept waking me to feed me ibuprofen and insist that I take a long pull on a bottle of water. The next morning the shivering gradually subsided, the fever ebbed and I felt like pressing on for another day.

So we went to the Kuala Lumpur Auto Show at the Putra World Trade Center.  There's nothing special on the car market in Malaysia but I wanted to take in the whole experience.  They were displaying Chinese semi trucks, Volkswagens assembled in India and locally made Peroduas.  But in some ways it was like the car shows I remember as a kid growing up in New York.  Back then cars were displayed at shows with the aid of provocatively dressed women but we're enlightened now and no longer do that in the US.  The official state religion of Malaysia might be Islam and many local women wouldn't dream of walking outside without their hair covered.  Female police officers here keep their hair tucked up inside of a sort of canvas helmet but they still do cars shows here the old school way, with provocatively dressed women posing for men holding fancy cameras with long lenses.  How refreshing.  How sad that such displays are against our state religion but an Islamic country seems to have no problem tolerating this.  As for how women are seen by the Malaysian car industry check out Perodua's Female Empowerment Movement, FEM for short.






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