I’m waiting for our luggage to come rolling along the figure eight carousal when Yang comes by and says she’s bargained the car rental down to 300RM. RM is Malaysian money and I’m not sure what the letters stand for or how to say it. I certainly don’t know the exchange rate to either RMB or USD. For all I know 300RM is $1000 or $1 RMB. So I ask the next logical questions “for a single day or the entire trip?” I find I often do this..asking the exact right question but no having a clue what I would do with the good answer. Yang said for the trip and I said “sounds good”. Next dilemma is that neither of us brought our Chinese driver’s license. For some reason we just keep that license in our car. I have, however, carried my expired California’s driver license…apparently just for these situations…where the airport car rental agency just wants to see a license, and the expiration date is not important or at least ignorable. As we sign the forms the agent is trying to explain that for any damage to the car, there is a 20% copayment. No attempt to up sell more insurance. He used a RM number as an example, a number which didn’t make sense until later. Yang asked if it was a “new car” and the agent blinked once and said it was a “good car” which is when I knew we probably didn’t get the best end of this deal. He smiled and gave us his number in case anything went wrong. I used an ATM to get some RM cash – the exchange rate turns out to be about 3.5 RM for every dollar so the car cost us about $20 a day. Not bad, I’m thinking. We get to the airport parking lot directly across from the terminal. The car rental agency shuttle consisted of a young Malaysian man standing beside and opened trunk of a car parked right in the middle of the aisle. At first I thought he was smiling at someone behind us – perhaps a relative arriving from out of town. But he was in fact smiling at us. And the smile seemed genuine vs. laughing at the woman pushing a five month old while sipping a venti java mocha frappuccino and the man pushing a luggage cart containing two insanely large pieces of luggage and two insanely hyper happy children. It would be forgiven if he thought we were moving to the island and not just visiting for a few days. The “good car” turned out to be a Proton Miva. It had electric windows that opened on the passenger side, an empty tank of gas, and air conditioning that worked if you drove fast. After our luggage somehow fit into the trunk, the attendant gave us his card and like the front desk man said to call him in case we have any problem with the car. While his tone was even more personable than the front desk person, this time it came across as both a warning and a threat. Like this car can and will break down. And if you call anyone else, they will never know you rented the car from us. They next day when heading into town I noticed the toolbox in the trunk had the usual assortment of tools. Plus brake pads and a plunger. A plunger? Oh, and they drive on the wrong side of the road in Malaysia. Buckle up kids!