One would think that the probability of speaking German with
locals on a Malaysian island is undoubtedly low. Well, maybe not when the owner of
the hotel you're staying in is an Indonesian married to a Swiss germanophone. And
things got linguistically messier when we discovered we could speak French
to her son, who had studied in France
for a while. And this in a place where female staff go around with theirs heads
covered. We also learned that the hotel's furniture came by boat from Indonesia. And we
go on about Schengen…! We had our heads in a twist but a few things remained in our memory: how to say cockroach in Bahasa: 'lipas'; and that Indonesians repeat a word twice to form the plural, so coffees
become 'kopi kopi' – now that's simply clever!
Malaysia, Truly Asia
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