melaka is a charm! it's a funny place for a portuguese, as we always hear stories from that town. and the portuguese are still very present there with ruins of stuff built on the 16th century. my favourite portuguese thing was the galeon that hosts the maritime museum - amazing to be in that boat and look to the straight of melaka. makes you think of afonso de albuquerque and all those old portuguese. after the portuguese came the dutch and took it all away. then the british. then japanese and now more contemporary economical and political interests seem to rule. chinatown is huge and one of the prettiest i know.
i stayed at a great guesthouse in melaka - KANCIL guesthouse :) ibrahim, the guy running the place (friend of the owner) is really nice and we found a common love for cybernetics! at the garden at kancil GH we shared lots of malaysian fruits - 2 new fruits for me in the middle of the typical south east asian variety :D yumm! and one day ibrahim took me for a walk around the city - what an amazing way to discover melaka! it was great because he's a civil engineer, so all the time he was pointing out evidences of past times in the buildings, like the bricks that made the foundations that would sometimes be dutch sometimes british. he also showed me the airplane used by the malaysian prime minister to go and get the paper declaring the independence of malaysia! (you can celebrate that onthe 31st of august) and then we walked around trying to pick the place for a new guesthouse - he had the engineer view on things, i had the traveller's insight ;) we found the perfect house with beautiful malay carvings and a huge garden around with palm trees and a nice welcoming look!
there's a portuguese settlement in melaka :) where they have a museum (closed when i got there) and 5 restaurants with "portuguese specialties". at the settlement they celebrate sao joao and sao pedro and they dance the portuguese folk dances!! quite impressive!
i left melaka in the early morning to go to a city i always wanted to go to..... kuala lumpur :)
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