Weekend Exodus

Last weekend was the first weekend in the fasting month. With it being just a mere month away from the Aidilfitri Celebration, the preparation for Aidilfitri has gone a few notches up everywhere in Brunei. This include make new dresses, updating old things and buying new things.

Talking about buying new things, one of the apparently must-go places for Bruneians was the border city of Miri. It was just less than an hour away from Kuala Belait; one hour if there was no traffic jam at all. Yesterday, it seemed like almost everyone in Brunei decided to hop over the border to Miri and admittedly I was one of them. The queue at the border post was long; when I reached the end of the queue just after noon, I had only just passed the '3km from Sungai Tujuh' mark, meaning that the queue was more than 2km long.

In Miri, almost every other car that you might see was a Brunei-registered car. And almost every other face you might see was a Bruneian face. How to spot a Bruneian face? If it was part of a big group walking together, most probably they were Bruneians. You could also go near to them and listen to them talking. And if it was a lady, just look at the way she hung the hand bag. If the strap went diagonally across her body or if she clutched her bag tightly against her body, most probably she was a Bruneian.

So what was so special about Miri or any other Malaysian towns? One of the reasons was that these towns had almost everything (everything except the higher end designer names, such as LV, Gucci, Prada, etc). The currency difference which favoured us Bruneians was another. Yesterday, I could get RM2.385 for every BND1 that I exchanged. Some of the items were a lot cheaper. A 5-kg bottle of cooking oil would cost BND12 here, whereas in the Malaysian towns, they would cost RM15. The cheapers items ranged from normal household goods to clothing, cds, furnitures and fast food.

So what good will it do to our economy and the Malaysian economy with this almost weekly exodus of Bruneians to the Malaysian towns? Imagine there were 2000 people hopped across the border yesterday and everyone spent a modest BND100, so that would mean BND200,000 were spent! And in a four weekend-month, that would be almost BND1million! It's little wonder you see these Malaysian towns grew a lot in the past 10 years and shophouses in Brunei remained empty.