Don’t fight change, embrace it
If you told me a year ago that I would be working next summer in a completely foreign country 15,000 km away from home, I would have called you a liar. Yet here I am in Malaysia for the first time in my life.
Imagine that you’re sitting in your living room back home in Canada. All of a sudden someone doubled the room temperature to 30 degrees. You try to reach out to get tap water to quench your thirst, but you find that the tap water is undrinkable. Then you decide to go to a grocery store and buy bottled water and food. As you show your credit card, the cashier said that they only take cash and no credit cards are allowed. Now you have to withdraw cash from the ATM, and you get your cards rejected from 5 different ATMs and get an extra $500 transaction in your bank account that didn’t happen because the ATMs were broken. You find that you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, dripping in sweat, with no water, no food, no cash, and missing 500 bucks. Now you know how frustrated I felt in my first few days in Malaysia. Never in my life have I ever struggled to get something so essential such as water and food.
Welcome to Malaysia, where you survive on bottled water and cash is king. I questioned why I gave up the luxuries of purchasing things at a tap of a card and walking to the kitchen to get water. However, I realized that if I’m going to be in Malaysia for three months, I should not regret over the things that I have given up in Canada. Millions of people in Malaysia lived this lifestyle everyday for their entire life, and if they can do it, I can do it to.
Slowly but surely, I open myself up to experience to Malaysian culture and everything isn’t that bad. Around 60% of the Malaysian population speaks conversational English, so language isn’t a huge barrier. Thankfully they’re kind enough to help out a lost foreigner and introduce me to local foods.
Malaysia is known as the food capital of Asia, so the food here is delicious. You can find popular meals from across Asia at Malaysian restaurants. For lunch, I devour a plate of the famous Mee Goreng from Singapore. For dinner, I finish a plate of signature Pad Thai with a glass of Tiger Beer and a couple of foreign friends from work. In the evenings, the city of Kuala Lumpur livens up, with music performances on the streets and store vendors aggressively convincing people to buy things at their store.
I’m excited to work as an entrepreneur-in-residence at dahmakan, a food startup that cooks and delivers healthy, ready-to-eat meals to people in Malaysia. My role is currently in product and operations. It’s a very hands-on position with big responsibilities. On my fourth day at work during the all team meeting, I had to give a short presentation on front of the entire team, including the CEO.
I’m currently living with two other interns from work, one of them happens to be Vlad, who’s another Canbridge Fellow from Canada! It helps so much to have someone else by your side who’s going through the same situation as you because you have someone to talk to and someone to hang out with. Also, chances are that when you want to travel to places across Malaysia and Asia, they haven’t been there either so they would also be interested to explore new places with you. Last weekend me and Vlad went hiking at the Bukit Gasing Hiking Trail in Malaysia with some of our co-workers and Malaysian friends and we had a great time.
One of my biggest life lessons from this experience is don’t fight change, embrace it. The next 3 months in Asia are going to throw a lot of different things at me from all angles, but the only way to form great memories is if I embrace this change and adapt to it. I look forward to more cool experiences in the next 3 months! :)
Company name & website if there is one: dahmakan, https://dahmakan.com/menu
Position (or what you think your position is called): Entrepreneur In Residence
Location (city, country): Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
One sentence describing how you found your internship: A friend of mine saw a dahmakan job posting and forwarded it to me, so I cold emailed the company’s executives to set up interviews and eventually secured a job offer.
Date of landing and date of starting your gig: Received job offer on March 27th. Started my job on May 10th.
