Exploring Melaka

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Melaka, or Malacca, is a nice city really. We went to see the palace museum and it was nicely done, I think. It was made of wood to replicate the original palace and had two rooms that illustrated and narrated two specific incidents that took place in the palace.

Porta de Santiago is probably the most famous thing here, though, so you can look up its history if you're interested, but I can tell you briefly that it was enormous and had buildings from both the Portuguese and the Dutch (they took it over from the Portuguese and added many buildings).

We had lunch at the Geographer's Cafe on Jonker Street before exploring the city some more and even arriving to the coastline. People were there flying kites and having picnics on the rocky shore. After this we went back to the apartment and took showers and were extremely pleased to notice that we had been accepted to couchsurf with someone in Singapore! This will save us heaps of cash...yay!

Anyways, Ronald had to work so we spent some time looking for an outlet or an adapter for his computer's cable and settled in at the Discovery Cafe & Guesthouse. There was a man on stage singing some truly awful karaoke, but occasionally some Chinese couples would get up and dance. A couple of times the women got on the dance floor and performed line dances as if it brought no pleasure -- when the song was over they just headed back to their seats without any sort of indication they'd been doing something more banal than writing down their phone number.

Anyways, we stayed for a while drinking some expensive beer and eating bad food, but I was very interested in a cart that was positioned on their patio next to the road. That place was hopping! I think there was only about a 2-minute stint when they didn't have a customer. We were told it was herbal tea and what they did was pour some in a bowl, sometimes mixing other things with it, and the customer would chug it in about 12 seconds before paying and walking or driving away. They also had a to go option and the girl would put it in a plastic bag and tie it with some string, but what I found really interesting was that some of them pulled faces as they drank it -- it must hold some high position in their society in relation to health...

Technical details
-Palace Museum admission fee: RM 2 for adults
-many public places are closed on Mondays and all places owned by the government are closed on Muslim holidays

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