Melaka

Matt and I went to Melaka this weekend with two friends - Arkadi and Margo. Arkadi you might remember from my diving certification trip, and Margo and Matt were in Peace Corps together.

First - a little prelude. I manage the membership database for the progressive Jewish community in S'pore. I got all of the updated membership data (in hard copy) this week, and I spent about six hours going through all of the forms, updating addresses, marking who has paid, organizing the data afterwards and making it look beautiful. Friday night, around 11:30, I finally finished, and I sent it off the the important people. Then, I couldn't sleep. I got out of bed around 12:30, and I came back to make the spreadsheet even prettier. When I opened it, it had reverted back to what I had on TUESDAY, before I had done any of the work. So, I stayed up until 3:30 finishing that again (it was faster the second time). Somewhere in the middle of that, two weird things happened. First, I started eating some dry corn flakes. Splinter was really curious and wouldn't leave me alone (she doesn't usually care about the food that we eat). I had put some in a bowl, which was on the floor, and when there were just a few left, I let her smell it, and then she ate them. We have only fed her cat food, and when we try to give her fruits and veggies, she's never interested. I thought her crunching on corn flakes was really cute...until she became uncute very quickly. She brought a lizard into the living room, put it down, and then she began torturing it - she would hit it, and then when it would run away, she would corner it, or just bug it. Finally, she ended up cutting off the tail (which was going nuts, even after its separating from the body), and then she chased the rest of it around the house for a very long time. This was really not cute.

Anyways, after one hour of sleep (I couldn't fall asleep until six!!!), Matt and I got up to go to our luxury bus to Melaka. We were in huge, wide seats that leaned all the way back. Most normal tour buses have 54 seats in them (yes, I have led trips before). Ours had 24. Though our first bus had more, since it was double decker. We went smoothly through the border and ended up in Melaka around 1.

Melaka is a small city that is on the west "coast" of main land Malaysia. It was about four hours on the bus. Basically, what I understand is that it used to be a major thoroughfare, but at this point, it's just sort of a place for tourists, and a place that they're starting to make a bit nicer. It is on the water, but there isn't yet anything of interest on the water, so we didn't spend much time around there. It has a nice river runnign up the middle of it, and we did enjoy that.

We stayed at a place called the Baba House, which is an old house - sort of colonial architecture with amazing Chinese woodwork. Our rooms didn't have windows, but we just pretended that the curtains were just drawn really tight (and they did have air con). We ate a lot (though that was challenging, since there's still a week left of Ramadan). We walked around everywhere, and that was my favorite. The buildings are just so interesting. The Portuguese had the city from the 1500s until the 1700s or something like that (no time for Googling right now), and then there were Dutch and British that came along also - so there is a lot of European influence, but it also looks amazingly beautifully Asian. We saw two really old mosques - one from the 1720s and one from the 1740s. We saw a church from the 1500s, a replica of a palace that was there in the 1400s (wood and no nails), and lots of windy roads. It wasn't the most pedestrian friendly place, but we did all live.

I'll upload a few pictures, but click here for the full album.