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Unspun was recently in Surabaya to media train clients and couldn’t help noticing how tidy and clean the city is when compared to Jakarta. How do they do it? Unspun hasn’t a clue except to muse that it should be a city to be emulated. Perhaps Surabaya-baed bloggers like Duncan Graham and Benny Chandra can enlighten us?
Perhaps Kuala Lumpur can also emulate this. Look at all the illegal dumps along the roadsides. And the amount of rubbish thrown into the rivers. And the authorities aren’t doing anything effective about the problem either.
Thank you, Bayi, for opening up the subject of cleansiness in KL. I’ve been living away from Malaysia for almost 20 years, and the one thing that I cannot understand is – How come the public toilets in the country have not improved? Every time I go back to visit, I am irked and disappointed and ashamed to see the toilets there still so filthy. Even places like KLCC, which is supposed to be an major tourist attraction, has pretty dirty toilets.
Filthy toilets there, in my opinion, are caused by:
(1) Lax cleaning efforts/standards of hygiene. Do the building managements not see the need to improve the hygiene standards? Don’t they at least notice the bad smells coming from the toilets?
(2) Uncivilised toilet-using habits of the locals. Malaysians have one of the most disgusting habits in using toilets. It’s very common to enter a cubicle and find the toilet seat sprayed with urine (if they want to squat on it to pee, at least clean up afterwards), unflushed feces in the toilet bowl when the flush is working (or worse, smears of feces that I imagine are wiped with the hand on walls), or menstrual blood everywhere/used sanitary towels carelessly discarded. To me, it speaks of a total disregard for other users and disrespect for fellow human beings.
I now live in Thailand, and most toilets here are immaculately clean. Why can’t Malaysians evolve to having more civilised toilet-using habits along with the country’s development?
What does it say about Malaysians on the whole?
Charismah
Thank you for highlighting the dirty toilet problem which wasn’t even what I was thinking when I first wrote my comments. I wish I could explain this but even if I could, it wouldn’t help solve the problem. Yes, I am a Malaysian and I have problems understanding why Malaysians behave this way. I believe in punitive measures if persuasion does not bring results but obviously the authorities think otherwise. Somehow it escapes these people’s thinking that keeping the toliets clean benefits everyone.
It’s Visit Malaysia Year 2007 and the people promoting the country have not seen it fit to eradicate this problem, Instead they have installed some very, very expensive toilets that can clean themselves. I wonder what that means but I do know that these toilets are very expensive and installing them won’t help create better and more hygenic habits.
Surabaya clean? Did you actually get out of the airport? Kali Mas is really Kali Hitam. I’ve just come back from a week in the Big Durian marvelling how you keep becak, kaki lima, warung dan lain-lain off the streets! Next time you want to visit Scunge City try looking down. This is good advice because of the potholes under the rubbish. To be fair it is a lot better – thanks to Mayor Bambang’s wife Dyah who is a real conservationist.
Duncan: All I can say is that my colleagues and I all thought that Surabaya was very clean and orderly compared to Jakarta. But then we were mostly traveling only between Rungkut and the City center.