Out in the wild

My house is in this really nice township called Setia Alam. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the best public transport links, and it's quite far away from the centre of town.

I did some digging, and I found out that there were two commercial areas close to my house - one's 5 mins' walk away, and the other takes 30. Unfortunately the further one has more amenities I wanted, like loads of bank branches and KFC(!) plus Pizza Hut :P

So I decided to be brave and walk it all the way there!

The long walk itself was pretty intense - the whole time, I was on high alert. After feeding off of the media's constant portrayal of crime and snatch thefts in Malaysia, I've grown paranoid myself about walking on my own. So I took the quickest route from home to the commercial area. I kept thinking people must have looked at me weird - why is there a single female lady walking on her own along streets of whizzing cars? It just seemed like the whole time, I was the only one walking! I then started to get paranoid of seeing any other non-vehicled human being, for fear of being robbed/raped/grabbed from behind..

But finally, after 30 mins of constant vigilance, I got there! I went to two bank branches, had my second KFC meal in the space of 3 days, and I walked the whole length and breadth of the commercial area. The population of this housing area seems to be predominantly Chinese, and it shows through the vast amounts of Chinese restaurants and shops throughout the area.

I really like the commercial area. Too bad it takes me 1 hour just to walk back and forth.

That said, the walk back was decidedly more pleasurable. I decided to take the longer route, so I walked across two community parks - one of which had a huge lake with people fishing around it, and the other had lots of sports stuff, like basketball courts, football fields and joggers' paths. It was a pretty pleasant walk back - once I stopped being so paranoid :)