Love Thy Neighbour

This is an ironic entry after the "Human Onion", but one must vent.

I live in a typical double-storey terrace house, without two cats in the yard..but unfortunately with limited parking spaces for a family with three cars.

Now I don't know about you, but from where I come from (which is just about 4 states and 7 houses all over Malaysia..) there is an unwritten but widely understood code which transcends race and religion when it comes to parking vehicles outside one's house:

Rule #1: The space in front of your house, i.e. your frontage is yours to park at even if it is technically "Kerajaan" land (same principle with people planting rambutan trees and the like outside their gates, no?)

Rule #2: If that space is left EMPTY (ha..now it gets tricky), neighbours/guests/strangers are welcome to park their vehicles there...or are they?

Being Malaysians and the muhibbah people that most of us are..I would say you can park there for as long as the person LIVING THERE clearly does not need that space for their vehicles. YES there is a first-come-first-served practice to a certain extent, but if we all kept that up persistently, where would we be? We would have people walking 10 roads away to the least inhabited/most haunted street to pick up their vehicles, and why?

Because their own street is cluttered with cars belonging to the guy with one Mercedes in the porch, another one on his frontage and his brother's Wira on his neighbour's. For the past six months...and counting.

In short, it is a matter of common sense. If you have one house, don't go and buy 5 cars la bruder! (Goodness knows you have money to buy another house!) And if you somehow end up with 5 cars...don't have to park them all outside your house right dude! Try the taman, the tasik..or the closest junkyard.

And this to my neighbour.. having a race with you daily to park on my OWN frontage is not my idea of constructive competition. Which was what we argued with him about a year ago. Which he responded to last Sunday by pulling up right behind our car when my parents were parked temporarily outside our gate, causing us to not be able to budge. Let me be petty for a minute and show you what I mean:

A rather ugly argument ensued I will admit, to which his grand contention was..."You can reverse your black (Kembara) car. I am parking on my frontage". Breathe..and count to 10. The narrow-minded and sempit-hearted ones can be so unreasonable that even poor Logic, forget Human Decency can't seep through their saturated pores.

He is migrating to Australia at the end of this year on grounds of a better education system overseas. "Uneducated people are like that" we heard him tell an onlooking neighbour last Sunday evening. If he represents good education, then good riddance I say and hope fellow Malaysians agree. He truly does not deserve this country.