It’s commonly been said that Singaporeans love to queue. This is possibly only upped by the Singaporean penchant for cutting queues. This is probably easiest to spot at any MRT station during peak hours, where one need not look too carefully to see many boarding passengers disdainfully hustle their way into the train cabin, wilfully ignoring the many passengers attempting to simultaneously alight. I have often been on the receiving end of this as well, and on several occasions have been forced to hustle my own way out to avoid being caught inside the train when the doors close.

This is, of course, despite numerous government campaigns to improve courtesy and such in Singapore. Today we still see plenty of littering, spitting, queue-cutting, inconsiderate and raucuous talking on buses and trains, rude and sarcastic behaviour from service staff… and so on, and so forth.

Thus I was pleasantly surprised during my weekend stay in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. On Friday evening, at about 6pm, we went to the KLCC station to catch a train back to Chinatown where our hotel was. There we were amazed to see Malaysians queuing up to enter the trains, a lovely sight which we know we’ll probably never see in Singapore unless the train companies start offering monetary incentives to queue properly.

Despite all the stereotypes about Malaysia being more backward than Singapore (I’m not interested in affirming or propagating these stereotypes, I’m merely acknowledging that they exist, albeit mostly in Singaporean minds) they’ve obviously got a better handle on this courtesy thing than we do. Also of note was that we received excellent service from our hotel staff (Swiss Inn Kuala Lumpur) as well as from the staff on the coach we took back to Singapore (Transnasional). All in all I’m left rather impressed by my most recent experience in Malaysia, and therefore dismally depressed with the state of our service industry and the general level of courtesy here in Singapore.

As an aside, the hotel we stayed in was along Petaling Street, which is also the name of the Malaysian meta-blog which in some ways inspired Tomorrow.sg. I only just realised that there was a Malaysian bloggers’ meet-up in KLCC on Saturday when we were running about Lot 10 and Bukit Bintang. Wish I’d known about that earlier.