Malacca

Last weekend I went to Malacca in Malaysia together with a ton of exchange students from NTU, NUS and SMU. A bit crowded, a bit too much of waiting and not the best execution of the plan but still had a lot fun!

We left on Friday evening with bus from campus, starting our journey north. The customs between Malaysia and Singapore was efficient and problem free and afterwards we had about a three hour drive to Malacca. The feature movie was Limitless which wasn't that bad at all and a pretty good bus movie. Arriving in Malacca at about 23.30 we we're served a tiny portion of cold chicken and rice balls, "the typical Malaysian cuisine". It was edible but didn't really feel like a proper meal at the time. We then checked in to our hotels and most of us went to sleep.

You couldn't really appreciate our 17th floor view in the middle of night as you could in the morning. It was a good view to wake up with and it felt like it was going to be a good day!

After some breakfast at an Indian-restaurant we started moving to old-town (Malacca is divided into new-town and old-town, old-town being the original Malacca with old buildings, churches and so on). Being a rather large group it took a while and we did a pit-stop at McDonalds for the people that hadn't eaten breakfast yet.

Finally we arrived in old-town were we went to the Cheng-Ho museum, a chinese merchant-fleet captain to dominated south-east Asia during his time.

And they had a cool compass with what I believe to be some sort of calendar.

After the museum we visited a tea-house just next door were we got to experience a "traditional Chinese tea-ceremony", it was fun to actually brew Chinese tea the "correct way" with all the cleansing of the cups, don't drink the first brew and so on. (Picture on the courtesy of Hallvard)

And to go with the tea we got some rice-pudding or something, they were a bit gelatinous for my taste though.

Afterwards we went looking for lunch, we found a place but due to a really slow restaurant and our lunch being time limited I had to leave before getting my food (everyone else got their food...) so my lunch consisted of water, cashews and peanuts... Kind of disappointing.

We then met up again to take a bus to our afternoon activities, and I had signed for an "ATV jungle adventure". It might not have been that much of an adventure as I had hoped but it was great fun driving the ATV-buggy me and Hallvard shared.

We managed to break to of them, we don't know what happened to the first one and the second one was missing a bolt for one of the wheels when we got back. :)

In the evening we had a eight course (I even think it was nine including the rice) dinner at a restaurant in old-town, it was fun to get to taste so many different dishes with everything from fruit and vegetables to mussels, chicken, fish and mutton.

We then headed back to our hotel were we had our pre-party pool-party! The pool might not have been that special but it's always nice to get to cool off here in south-east Asia! The real party then was at a club just across the street, it was a bit funny since no one was dancing until we arrived and I think we made the DJ feel a little more appreciated actually giving some kind of response to his music.

On the Sunday it was more free-for-all and I went around with Per and Hallvard looking at some of Malaccas historical sites, we took a boat-tour on the Malacca river and took a stroll in a shopping mall. So now I have a sun-feather and a couple of sun-glasses!

We saw a lot of monitor lizards in the Malacca river!

At 17 we went home with the bus and unfortunately the featured movie was a crap-quality Fast and Furious 5 so I mostly slept on the way home.

It might not have been the perfect trip but I still had lots of fun in Malacca! :)