Melaka: a little bit of Holland far away from home :)

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Time for our next stop in Malaysia: Melaka! Unfortunately it wasn't possible to take a direct bus from the Cameron Highlands (I know, we are a bit spoiled), so we had to first get to Kuala Lumpur where we would hopefully be able to get on a bus to Melaka. Fortunately it all worked out well, but it was kind of a hassle altogether, also because we weren't sure yet where we wanted to stay in Melaka. Altogether it took us most of the day to get from our hostel in Cameron Highlands to ours in Melaka.

Our first impression of Melaka was that it was, well, pretty quiet. I guess it was the low season at the moment, but many restaurants and bars were either closed or very quiet. We managed to find one really nice restaurant (turned out they even had live music later in the evening), actually it was the first one we had passed but then we were still optimistic and first wanted to see what Melaka had to offer (not that much obviously 😉). Eventually we had dinner in the same restaurant three nights in a row, haha.

During the day Melaka was a lot less quiet, fortunately. Especially the Time square, also known as the Dutch square, where a lot of traces from the colonial times can be found, was very nice and interesting. Among others we have seen the Stadhuys, the Dutch graveyard and two old churches. In addition, we have seen two museums, that turned out to tell pretty much the same story, which on its turn turned out to be very similar to the things we had seen in the national history museum in KL. You could conclude two things from this: (a) that we are very well informed about the Malaysian history now and/or (b) we are kind of fed up with history musea at the moment 😉.

Another thing we liked a lot was a big shopping mall.. No worries, haven't shopped that much, but it was just fun to see, plus malls offer a great variety of not that expensive food, which was useful at that time since food in Melaka turned out to be a bit more costly than we were used to. But, the best part is yet to come.. There was also a cinema inside the mall!! Although there wasn't that much choice (and in the end the movies we have seen weren't that great, "World Trade Center" and "the Prestige") and the Malaysian subtitles were annoying, it was just so good for a change to go to the movies again! With real popcorn 😉!

Having spent 2 1/2 days in Melaka we had the feeling we had seen most of the things that were worth seeing, so we went on to our next destination: Singapore!

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