We went to Malacca primarily for Elena to choose her Kabaya (she covers this in her post on the topic), but it’s always a nice getaway for the weekend. It’s a three-four hour drive depending on the road conditions and other drivers, and I slept through all of the drive. I tried the old “resting my eyes” excuse that always worked for Granddad, but I guess I don’t have his honest look – no-one believed me. Perhaps the snoring gave it away…
Anyway, once there we dealt with the business at hand – we ate. I think I mentioned before that the Wan Tan Mee in Malacca is the best around, and we stopped off there again. It didn’t disappoint, and I was left split between sharing another bowl, and making the most of the other food on offer in the town. I got the better of my greed, and we wondered of to deal with Elena’s Kebaya (on a separate note, one day I’ll perhaps compile a list of the best Wan Tan Mee stalls in Singapore. It might include the Mei Ling food court, the one in Toa Payoh, the one at Cambridge Road….hey, I’m a researcher – what can I say!)
Something else we had that day was Chendol(left), a desert that includes a lot of brown sugar, coconut milk, and ice. On a hot day, there’s nothing like it. The brown sugar is the Gula Malacca I mentioned before (although it was in beer in a previous post), but here it was in its pomp, holding together ice. The secret is not to mix the ice, milk, and sugar together too much – if you do that, you get a sweet goo. If you leave it fairly unmixed, you can appreciate the finer flavours of the desert in their own right…!
We headed into the night market later that evening. Interestingly (and I only just found this out, the same way you did if you cliked on the link I kindly provided), Pasar is a Malay word derived from Bazaar in Persian. So now you now. Anyway, you’ll see from the pic on the left that the night market is usually along one street, with stalls either side selling all manner of things. Usually toys and trinkets, they are quite fun, and they sell a lot of stuff to tourists. They call out to people as you pass by, enticing you to buy anything from a platsic gun, to a barking toy dog, and so on. The streets are usually quite busy but it makes for a great atmosphere, and certainly something that everyone should see when they are in this part of the world.
We stopped off at a shop along the road to take a look at some of their paper-cutting art. This isn’t as odd as it sounds, and is a traditional art form in China. Using just paper, scissors, and perhaps a knife, some artists are able to create incredibly intricate pictures or landscapes. We were amazed by a TV show in China about a very old women who did this for a living. She was around 80 years old, but was fantastically talented. Anyway, we fell in love with the technique then, and were lucky enough to find a paper-cutting of the Chinese symbol for double happiness, a traditional feature of Chinese weddings.
What the also sell is food. Street markets in Asia usually sell loads of food at small stalls, often cooked up in front of you, and usually inexpensive. This was the case in china and Thailand, and is the case in Singapore and Malaysia. I love eating this kind of food, and can’t resist trying a few things. Something that caught my eye was deep-fried ice-cream. Take a slice of bread, wrap it around a ball of ice-cream, and then drop in super hot oil for about 15 seconds. The bread is crispy and fried, and the ice-cream is still frozen. And all for only 499 calories. But it is great, and I’d recommend it to anyone. I also ate a curry puff and a char siew puff. Fantastic. However, I was quite full the next day, and still am rather full today (Tuesday).
What else? Well, the next day we headed down to Tesco. Malacca has an enormous Tesco shop, and we often stop in on the way back to Singapore to pick up some groceries. It’s a little cheaper than Singapore, and Singapore doesn’t have Tesco. Here’s a pic of me outside Tesco, just to prove it. It’s always exciting to go into a shop like this abroad; we used to have the same experience going to Carrefour in China last year. The Tesco was hugely busy, and there must much coming together of trolleys. In the end, we didn’t stay for long, although I bought some cereal (note: the Handbag belongs to Elena's mother; not me. Mine is in the car).
Whilst we were there, however, I had time to inspect at first hand a car "built in a jungle clearing by people who go to work in shoes made from leaves", according to Jeremy Clarkson. The Malaysians were (understandably) unhappy about his comments. However. he was referring to the Perodua Kelisa, whereas I got to sit in the Perodua Myvi. And actually, it wasn’t half bad. It was small, but it looked kind of fun, and was only around £4,000. It reminded of the Mitsubishi Colt, which can’t really be a bad thing. There were loads of them on the highways in Malaysia, and I actually quite liked it.
