Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Perlis Trip




It was an early start (drive) for me today - 6.30am to be exact. Since I have never driven to Perlis by myself - we (me and an office colleague) were all prepared with printout of the maps and Garmin setup to the exact location. We were so sure of ourselves, that we missed the junction to Changloon! Lucky we realized it very early and scrambled to switch on Mr Garmin..he..he...


We are here for a Nanotechnology seminar and workshop organized by one of the local university here. What interest us is that the workshop (tomorrow) is going to be conducted by a renowned scientist from NASA. He gave a brief seminar this morning - and it was great - an eye opener.


After the morning seminar, we checked into a new hotel in Kuala Perlis and then headed to the a few schools (the university) - for a courtesy call + discussing some possible final year and post grad projects. What we (initially) did not realize is that the campus are scattered everywhere - basically all over the state!


The main hall in one area, Material school in another area, Nano Tech institute in another area and the Mechatronic school some distance away. And to top it all, most of these areas are not recognized by Mr Garmin. So we have to stoop to the old-fashioned way of trial and error plus seeking assistance of shop owners to tell us the way...hu..hu...Sempat la jugak sesat sana sini....


The thing is that, the signage here is plain 'bad'. Very poor. I mean, the university is quite prominent - at least you expected that there'll be a lot of signage showing the route to their campuses - but no, we were expected to know our way. Probably they don't have that many visitors - and locals know the place like the back of their hand. A day before the trip we actually asked for the street name from the secretariat - who told us that there is NO street name (mind you this is in the center of Kangar - the capital of Perlis). Being local, probably they are not aware of the street names. The signage really sucks! Most Malaysian signages are NOT user friendly - though I have to say that I am impressed with the ones in Malacca.Theirs are very good and strategically placed!



No comments:

Post a Comment