When I came to Malaysia again, my goal was to stay in a safe country until the problem with the Covid-19 coronavirus problem ends. Seeing what was happening around the world with each country slowly getting some cases, I knew I had to lay low somewhere, and since my visa in Thailand was about to expire, I chose Malaysia. At least I get three months visa over here, so this would be plenty of time for me to just chill until everything goes back to normal, but I would have never thought that it would become a full blown pandemic and that a lot of countries are going to in a lockdown. Well, anyway I am glad that I got stranded here rather than another country which was not good enough to handle this kind of problem. By the way, a few days before the lockdown, I did get an alert email message from the US Embassy telling me to get back to the US as soon as possible due to the increasing number of cases in Malaysia. And yes, it was increasing. But good thing, I decided to stay. Now look at the stats. Right now as I write this (July 6, 2020), Malaysia only has 8668 cases and 121 deaths in contrast with US, which has 2.93 million cases and more than 132,000 deaths. So my decision was right on. And with Donald Trump as the president, the US is not doing well with the pandemic as of this moment. Actually just within the last 24 hours, the US just got more than 40,000 new Covid-19 coronavirus cases. To add fuel to the fire, there is also a battle going on between the Republicans/Conservatives and Democrats/Liberal, the Left Wing versus the Right Wing. Furthermore, also protests started happening due to the killing of George Floyd by a cop, exposing the racism that’s been hidden for so long. Well, not hidden. But more like ignored. This even created tensions between the Republicans and the Democrats. From what I could see, there seems to be more racist people on the Republican side. Well, I am not gonna talk about that for now. Then with conspiracy theories, the question of whether to mask or unmask, etc., it even made the situation much worse. For sure, I am grateful to the Malaysian government for granting me along with other foreigners who got stranded here an extended visa at least until August 31. Now that travel is not feasible anymore, my goal now is to settle down in one country and just stay put. In a way, I need to get myself established in just one place, and this pandemic gave me an excuse to do that. Would I travel again? Of course, but for now, it is on hold. If I do travel, maybe it won’t be an extended travel for a while. More like a few days or two weeks here an there.
