Johor Bahru, Malaysia

Johor Bahru sits right next to the national boundary between two inseparably linked countries and has all the blessings and blemishes to show for it. Nowhere else in Malaysia better displays the differences between two intertwining streams of history. Today, the city becomes known as a 'half-price bazaar' for everything from groceries to golf to thousands of Singaporeans, enriched by a strong currency. Happenstance and the Johor Bahru's reputation for comparatively inexpensive shopping and entertainment, however, have also made the arterial thoroughfare of Jalan Wong Ah Fook into an extension of the perpetual traffic snarl at the Causeway. Cars bearing number plates of two diametrically opposed vehicular policies rumble past incessantly, sometimes haltingly, and the resultant air quality had one influential writer branding it the 'hanging air of decay'. He must have also meant the soot-stained four-storey shop-houses bordering on the brink of dilapidation at the centre of the scene, where customary and flesh trades call their address. Like it or not, those bristling money-changers, 7-Eleven stores, pirated-VCD peddlers, squalid coffee shops and throngs of hurried people have stuck on like an unsavoury icon of this historic border town.