Malaysian Passport Renewal at UTC Pudu Sentral, Kuala Lumpur

Saturday, 25.08.2018

0600: Left the house
0610: Parked near the MRT station
0620: Took the MRT
0635: Arrived at Merdeka MRT station
0645: Arrived at UTC Pudu Sentral. 30-40 people ahead of me in the queue.

0650: Doors open. We get to sit on the chairs for waiting. Everyone sits in sequence. Lights are still off, so we have to sit in the darkness. I read a notice on the wall and it says the office opens at 0830. 

0700: Lights just turned on, now everyone can read.

 

0740: 100+ people waiting. Only the first 50 or so have the privilege to sit. The rest gotta stand at least an hour. Security uncle tells me later that the normal crowd at weekends is like this. Lots of families with kids. Not many senior citizens for now. I remember that my parents went on a working day and reached there around 8 am or so. For them it was still okay, but they qualify for the seniors lane so they get priority service.  

 

0825: Five minutes to opening time. I estimate 300+ people here. Imagine 250+ people standing for more than an hour before the doors open. Even after that they would need to continue standing for at least another 30 minutes before they can get a number. 

0830: Doors open! Senior citizens (age 60 and above) go in first. They get numbers starting with 2001. They only need to pay RM100/= for a five-year passport compared to us who have to pay RM200/=.
0850: I got No. 1025. Now serving No. 1005.

0905: Serving 1007 and 2004. Super slow ... Now moving a bit faster. If got kids, takes longer. Or if got people do passport first time.

0945: My number got called. Thumbprint, take photo, check details, sign. Now waiting to pay $. Depending on your luck, the immigration officer could be chatty or straight to the point. Mine was nice, just a few routine questions (Marital status? Address? Phone number? Same as before?) and that's it. At another booth I saw another officer ask a kid "What's your name, where do you go to school, what's your friend's name, where are you going, Korea?" For a young teenager, the questions were "What's your identity card number, etc."

 

1020: Still waiting to pay. Number 1280 just given out at the counter.

1030: Paid RM200/=, got back my identity card & payment receipt, passport ready in half an hour. So gonna wait till 1100.

 

1110: Passport collected. Everything okay. Done! Yippee! Yoohoo! See you (UTC) in four and a half years' time.

Takeaway: Best to go on a working day during non-school holidays. Weekend plus school holiday means super crowded. On such days, numbers run out around 1030. Security guard uncle told me that only 300-400 numbers are given out on any one day. So if you're late, come again another day. And when you come, please come before 6:45 am if you want to sit down. I was lucky. All the best in your passport renewal or new passport application! 

P.S.: Renewals are the most straightforward. All you need is your old passport, your identity card, RM200/= cash and yourself. That's it. No forms to fill in, no photos to bring along because they take your photo there and then. Oh yeah, very important, no contact lenses allowed because they want the photograph to capture your iris. So wear spectacles for that day if you're a contact lens wearer because you just need to take off the specs while being photographed. Also wear a dark coloured shirt so there's contrast with your face, but no worries they have jackets ready for wearing.

My language and life situation as of August 2018

Two years ago, in 2016, I wrote this:
http://ujoelee.blogspot.com/2016/08/im-just-language-learner-not-polyglot.html
Let's see how far I've gone this year.

On 30 July 2018, I passed the Goethe C1 exam in Kuala Lumpur. I have German C1 written on my resume, and I speak the language well enough to communicate with native speakers. Consider this a birthday present exactly one month in advance.

I believe my speaking ability in German overtook my Mandarin sometime in 2017. Most probably in mid-year. The opportunity to teach A1 and A2 learners gave me a strong push to improve my reading and speaking especially with monolingual textbooks which I had not up to that point in time used.

At the end of 2016 I had found a few language exchange partners via the HelloTalk app. In February 2017 I got to know Nataša from Bosnia, who was learning superintensively on her own and was at that time active on the DW - Deutsch lernen Facebook site. In fact from mid-2016 up to late 2017 I diligently hand-copied all the "Aufgaben & Lösungen vom (date)" on a daily basis and also other postings on verbs, easily confused phrases and so on.

Thanks to Nataša I got inspired to learn Serbian. I listened to songs, watched YouTube videos, basically the same thing I did to learn German. However, German learning took up 90% of my time and so my Serbian is still at the A1 stage. It's not yet up to a level I can really converse in.

Now that my German is firmly established at C1 level, I can learn more Serbian, but soon I shall start a new full-time job, and with that means less time for everything else. Still I am very grateful to be given the chance to step back into a so-called "normal" life after years in the wilderness.

Nobody knows the future. I do not know if all these was "pre-planned" by a higher power, but I do know that when I started to learn German seriously in early 2016 (even before the CELTA course started), it was like an inner conviction that I would go far with it.

It didn't happen overnight, it took time and meeting the right people along the way. People who practiced speaking or chatting with me, people who gave me the chance to share my passion and knowledge, people who guided me with advice, feedback and suggestions, people who opened doors for me, people who corrected me when I made mistakes. I am grateful for all these.

Even when I was down and out in terms of career and finances I still had the dream of going to Europe one day. I wanted to be in a German-speaking environment and experience being there, interacting with like-minded people, savoring the cool weather and participating in a culture different from the one that predominates in my home country. Now I am one step closer to the dream, the immediate challenge is to deliver the goods in my work first.

In a month I will be forty. Ever since some thing happened in the past seven years or so, I just knew that my life path will never be conventional. I just cannot live the same stereotypical conventional family life or career path that many others live. It has to be something that suits me and that I can do better than other things.

Well, as they say in German, "die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt". I believe as long as I continue to do the right thing at the right time, stay true to myself and do good, constructive things in life, I will survive. There will of course be down times, but they shall not be fatal.