The school put us in a hotel for a fortnight while we found somewhere to live. Marble floors, marble walls, corridors you could land a plane in, and an ice rink. An actual ice skating rink, in the hotel, in a country that has never seen ice occur naturally.
There was a tunnel on the second floor that led straight into the shopping mall next door, so you could go and buy things without ever encountering weather. There were three restaurants. One of them was a family bar-restaurant with a live band on at weekends.
I never saw the band.
Not once, in two weeks. I kept saying we’d go down. It was three floors and a covered walkway away. But we’d been out exploring all day, every day, and by nine o’clock we were both face-down and unconscious like a pair of Victorians. I don’t drink and I don’t smoke, so it wasn’t even that — I just wanted to sit somewhere with a Coke and listen to a band, and I was too knackered to walk downstairs to do it.
That’s my one regret from the whole fortnight, which tells you it was a good fortnight.
The catch
The hotel was free, in the sense that the school paid for it. Accommodation is part of my wife’s package — the salary is lower than the English equivalent, but somewhere to live comes on top.
The catch is that they pay for it. They don’t find it. That was our job, and we had fourteen days.
They did give us help: a lady who’d show us around and knew the market. Very generous. Genuinely useful.
She was Chinese.
We had landed in the middle of Chinese New Year.
Ten days of nothing
She was, entirely reasonably, on holiday. As was much of the country. So of our fourteen days, ten of them were unusable.
Four days to find a home in a city we had arrived in the previous week.
I want to be clear that nobody did anything wrong here. The school was generous, the agent was helpful, and Chinese New Year is one of the biggest holidays in the Malaysian calendar. We simply hadn’t thought to look at a calendar, because in England the only date that shuts anything down is Christmas, and we’d have noticed that one.
So: check the calendar before you count on your days. Chinese New Year, Hari Raya and Deepavali all move around, and when they land, agents, banks and offices go quiet for a stretch. If someone’s given you a fortnight of temporary accommodation, find out how many of those days are actually working days before you start relaxing in the hotel with the ice rink.
The choice that decided everything
We saw three places. It came down to the first two, and it came down to a single appliance.
Flat one: two bedrooms. No oven. A taxi to work every day.
Flat two: one bedroom. An oven. Twenty minutes’ walk to the school.
Put like that it sounds obvious. It didn’t feel obvious at the time, because an extra bedroom sounds like more, and more sounds like better.
But the spare room was unfurnished, had no bed in it, would have needed furnishing at our expense, and — being honest with ourselves for once — would have been used roughly never. A room we’d walk past.
The oven, meanwhile, would be used every single day.
We took the oven. We’re still in that flat.
Why an oven is a bigger deal here than it sounds
This is the bit I’d genuinely want a British person to know before they start viewing places, because I’ve never seen it in a relocation guide and I only learned it by luck.
Ovens are not standard in Malaysian kitchens.
It isn’t a shortage or a cost-cutting thing. Malaysian cooking is built around the hob, the wok and the steamer. An oven simply isn’t required equipment, so a lot of perfectly nice, perfectly modern kitchens don’t have one, and nobody thinks anything of it. “Unfurnished” here can also mean no kitchen units and no cooker at all, which is a slightly bracing discovery if you’re used to British lettings.
And you won’t think to check, because at home an oven is just part of what a kitchen is. You don’t walk into a flat and confirm there’s an oven, any more than you confirm there’s a floor.
The good news, which I wish I’d known at the time: most landlords will install one if you ask, particularly for a longer let. It’s a normal request. So if you find a place you love and the kitchen’s oven-free, that’s a conversation, not a dealbreaker.
The reason it mattered so much to us is that my wife cooks, and cooks properly — she’s owned a restaurant, she could run a kitchen, and I’d put her food against most places I’ve paid to eat in. And there is no British food to be had here. No carvery. Western food that’s often slightly sideways — steak arriving with spaghetti marinara, that sort of thing. So anything that tastes of home gets made at home.
An extra bedroom wouldn’t have fed us.
What I’d actually check when viewing
- Is there an oven. Look. Don’t assume.
- Are there proper ceiling fans in the bedroom and living room — this is worth an absurd amount of money
- Walk to the station yourself. Five minutes on a map can be five minutes along a road with no pavement
- Go and look at the pool and the gym. Every building lists them. Not every building maintains them
- Ask what’s included — maintenance fees, who pays what. It’s a normal question
The part I didn’t expect
We chose flat two because of the oven. What we actually got was the walk.
For the first year, I walked my wife to work every morning at seven, and I was outside at four every afternoon to walk her home.
It was a strange city, she didn’t know the way, and at seven in the morning here it’s still dark — no gradual British dawn, the sun just arrives. So I worked out the route and we walked it. Twice a day. Every day. For a year.
Forty minutes a day, walking through a city we were both learning, talking.
We picked that flat over a spare bedroom because of a cooker. It turned out to be the best decision we made, and not for any of the reasons we thought.
More: how renting actually works in KL, which areas to look at, and what it all costs.
FACTS CHECKED
✓ Ovens are not standard in Malaysian rental kitchens, and “unfurnished” can mean no kitchen units or cooker — expat housing guidance for Malaysia
✓ Landlords will commonly install an oven on request, especially on longer contracts — same source
✓ Malaysian cooking is predominantly hob, wok and steamer based rather than oven based
✓ Chinese New Year is a major Malaysian public holiday during which many businesses close
✓ The hotel, the ice rink, the band, the four-day flat hunt, the oven decision and the year of walking — Edward’s own account
⚠ No salary or income figures given. Only the structure of the accommodation arrangement is described.
⚠ Holiday dates move year to year — readers are told to check rather than given fixed dates.
