Is Malaysia a good country for living?

What was the biggest shock when you visited Malaysia for the first time?

Dirk Weber, Regular traveler in Southeast Asia

I am from Germany. But when I first arrived in Malaysia I had already travelled for a year or so in Southeast Asia and had previously spent three months in Thailand. So my culture shock was rather comparing my travel experience in these countries than with my own culture.

I arrived in a relative touristy region of Malaysia, with the train in Butterworth to get to Penang. Like in many places among the first to greet me were taxi drivers. Of course they asked me if I needed a ride. I was already prepared for an annoying discussion why I needed none and told them I would take the ferry. And instead of telling me that there was none or that it takes too long, was too expensive etc like drivers in touristy regions of Thailand would do, they just showed me the way to get there. The same happened when I arrived in Penang.

Another thing was that many people spoke quite good English and how more developed everything was. Remember that we talk about first impressions. And I did not arrive directly from the wealthy quarters of Bangkok but from less developed places.

Is Malaysia a good country for living?

By Gareth Davies, Lived in Malaysia for 13 Years (KL)

As a non-Malaysian who has lived here for a long time, I’d say it has ups and downs. I’ve been here since 2004, so I have witnessed the rapid (and not so rapid) transformation of the country during the era of digitalisation.

If you are single or a young-couple it’s a great hub with fairly high English proficiency, very multi-cultural and amazing food culture.

It’s a really good place to travel regionally, cost of living is still fairly low apart from Cars (which have become a lot less necessary with Uber and Grab) and housing which can be reasonable if you don’t stay in a prime area (KL, Mon’t Kiara, Bangsar).

Income tax is fairly high, higher than Singapore (22% vs 28% max cap) for example which has FAR better infrastructure, Internet, education levels, public transport etc.

But there are a lot of downsides, the way people drive, the lack of consistent, easy to access public transport (which has improved a lot in the past year), the currency has fallen a long way against USD/Euro, education is not great here (or REALLY expensive) if you are having kids soon, the talent-pool here if you are building a company or in a position of hiring is not great due to the economic factors of hiring World class talent and customer service is a non-existent concept here (If you find a fly in your food, or a waiter spills something on you, don’t expect more than a grunt).

The country is also corrupt from top to bottom which means there are artificial glass ceilings, certain industries are completely dominated by crony-ism and the whole area of law enforcement is fairly flexible. If you are ever a victim of a crime here, do not expect anyone to ever get punished for it.

Then there’s the political instability, the questionable practises during the general election and so on.

The weather also seems great at first, you never need more than shorts and a t-shirt, but after a while the humidity and sweating whilst standing still doing nothing becomes a bit tiresome, people live from aircon in the house, to aircon in the car to aircon in the office to aircon in the shopping mall.

There’s two seasons, hot and wet, and hot and wetter.

Plus people say the islands are beautiful, which they are on the East coast, but they are only accessible half of the year, from October until March they are basically closed.

People have very little civic conciousness here (you will regularly see people littering, you won’t be able to get out the lift or LRT without someone barging in first, people regularly cut queues), which can be frustrating as it’s such a beautiful country with a lot of natural resources.

As someone else mentioned too, people also complain a lot, but do very little, most of the social enterprises here in Malaysia are run by foreigners.