Lovely Melaka (or Malacca, depending on how you want to spell it)

So here are lots of photos of our weekend in Melaka. It's a lovely little town, that despite lots of development, the government have decided that building a new town next to the old one and doing up the old one is a smart idea (wowee, they never figured that one out in Kuala Lumpur, oh no, they love knocking down beautiful old buildings to build rancid generic towerblocks over here).

Malacca is a very old town, and was one of the most important in the world for hundreds of years. The old town is a mix of dutch and british colonial architecture - along with a load of Straits Chinese (a mixed race of chinese, malay and indonesian also known as Baba-Nyonya or Peranakkan) shophouses - the really colourful upper floor on one of the pics is a good example.

The Baba-Nyonyas are famous for their amazing food (yum) and gypsy like bizarrely gaudy but beautifully intricate furniture, houses, clothes, and general style. These dudes knew how to mix up styles and colours that would ordinarily look utterly vile, but pulled it off with style for a long time.

Malacca is pretty small, but for such a small town it has a wealth of history. It started back in the time of the Ming Dynasty, when a hindu sultan from Indonesia came here and started a small trading port where the East and West Monsoons meet. His settlement was in the perfect position, because ships could come down the straits instead of circumnavigating the dangerous path around the indonesian archipelago. Ships from India and China would ride their individual monsoon winds, meet in Melacca, trade goods and then ride home when the winds changed.

The portugese were the first europeans to make a move on the place, deciding to go straight for the heart of the lucrative spice isles instead of trading with india - so they invaded and built the town into an massive fortress. They settled here for 130 years, and because of their enforced interbreeding with the locals, there is still a settlement of portugese eurasians by the waterfront. These guys speak Cristau, which is a completely dead medieval language from southern portugal (I think some people still speak it in Goa, but not too sure).

After the portugese came the Dutch, who lay seige to the place for 8 months or so, totally annihalating all of the portugese buildings in town, all that now stands is one of the old gatehouses - but the dutch rebranded even that with the logo of the Dutch East India Company.

The Dutch settlers stayed even longer than the portugese, and built a large amount of beautiful buildings (using most oddly, pink bricks which they shipped over specifically from Holland. Weird). Most of which are still standing and make up a really lovely little quarter of town, now mostly museums, that stands out as some surreal european outpost. There's the pink, bell gabled Christchurch, next to the enormous Stadthuys, a little windmill, clocktower, warhouses with the little winches that they have all over amsterdam. Very photogenic indeed.

They also built an enormous city wall to protect Malacca from outside invasion. Which looks like it would have been amazing.

However....

Then along came the might and majesty of the british empire, the good old glory days of Victoria and her utterly insane Generals. We got a hold of Malacca, not really through conquest but by being more powerful than the Dutch by that point, I don't really know how, something to do with politics and all that. Anyway, we got hold of Penang (in the North of Malaysia) by conning the Sultan of Kedah, and we got hold of Singapore but conning and threatening the Sultan of Johor. So the one in the middle just made sense - thus Penang, Melaka and Singapore became the Straits settlements, and lovely they were for it.

Because we put more importance on Singapore and Penang, the once mighty international trading hub of Melaka was relegated to the sidelines. Some utterly insane toff (I think it was Lord Farquand or some other sill rich inbreed) figured the best idea was to move all the people out to Penang (why?) and just leave Melaka to rot. However some other silly Brits got all paranoid that leaving a fortifed city just sitting there would be too much of a good thing for those naughty Dutch (even though the Dutch had willingly handed the place over as a British protectorate to stop the smelly and untrustworthy garlic eating Frenchies from getting hold of it) so this lunatic Lord Farquand decided to totally raze the city walls. He tried getting a bunch of locals to do it, but it was too well built and a bugger to knock down. So instead he opted for getting them to knock holes in the walls, then pack them with dynamite, then the mad lord ran around on his horse with a long burning torch and set the whole lot off.

Stamford Raffles (the father of Singapore and all that) arrived just a little bit too late to stop the lunatic Lord. He told him to stop it as he was being rather silly and wasting good quality dynamite, as well as making a jolly awful racket and a lot of mess which the darkies would spend ages having to tidy up. Or something like that.

But alas the city walls of Melacca were no more, but Stamford no doubt stopped the deranged royalty from making a giant bomb crater out of the whole town.

As for the Dutch trying to regain control of Melacca? They didn't care, they were beaen anyway, but there we go.

So hows that for a history lesson? Not bad eh. Nice town, great food, brilliant museums and lots of markets, we all had a jolly spiffing time. Shame it was about 38c in the shade though, my skin is blistered.

long time catchup

So, it's been ages since i updated this blog. It's going to take a bit of time to get you up to speed on Timbos activities over the last month or so.

Starting from where I left off, here goes:

So I got fired. For the first time ever i got given the boot, and for no apparent reason whatsoever. OK so I told the boss a few times that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing, and basically told him that the best thing he could do would be stay well away from the project and just sign the cheques, but that is beside the point because deep down he knew that I was totally right, except he is a very silly and very rash individual who acts on a whim without consulting anybody, then regrets his actions later. He fired vanessa at the same time, which was also a very silly thing to do. He has since realised the error of his ways, and asked us to go back and renegotiate, but Van now has a new job (starting next week) with the biggest Special Effects company in Malaysia, so she ain't going back for any reason at all. I simply can't face another day with Keith being my boss, he's a lovely guy but just far too much of a child to deal with and his penny pinching tight-arsedness is just more than I can handle. I mean the guy was asking me to run all purchases I made past him - and wait for him to sign the money off - even for things that cost around £2. Ridiculous.

Anyway. Getting fired was great, immensely liberating in fact, so much stress that I hadn't even realised I was under just fell away. As a present to ourselves we decided to go on a much needed holiday. So off we went on the train up to Thailand. Vanessa was a bit worried about taking the train cos the south of thailand is a little bit dangerous at the moment, what with some seperatists blowing up lots of stuff and cutting off chinese peoples heads and leaving their corpses in plantations, and the Thai army going in and executing thousands of people around the region. But the journey was actually very uneventful, no explosions or shrapnel wounds at all.

We webt back to Phuket to go visit Kim, and we had a great 8 days there. Kims mum let us stay in the hotel (In on the Beach) on Karon beach, totally for free cos nobody else was there. This place usually cost about £50 or more a night (a flipping fortune over here, proper expensive) and is absolutely lovely. You just step off the hotel doorstep right onto the white sand beach which is so fine it squeaks as you walk along it.

We generally passed the days reading (Kim took us to a great 2nd hand bookshop which sold brilliant books, my favourite being a 1972 guidebook to Malaysia, which is fascinating but brings a bit of a tear to my eye when you look at the savage damage capitalism has brought around to this country) and eating nice food. We had the usual games of "spot the ladyboy" and "hooker slalom" but because it was low season there was nowhere near the usual amount of hassle.

Vanessa and I went SCUBA diving a few times, Vanessa went on her first wreck dive, which was a bit scary for her I think cos the visibility was low and wrecks always abound with dangerous spikey things, rusty metal and poisonous creatures. My idea of fun, not hers, maybe its a boy thing. We saw a really big turtle having a sleep inside a doorway, really well hidden, but I couldn't quite figure how he was supposed to get out again.

We met a lovely guy called King on Phuket, a chinese-ozzie, who is living over in KL for 8 weeks as part of his Doctor training. His real name is Wan King Man. No shit. Wan being his family name, but the chinese put the family name first. Wan King Man, I've had to take the mickey for that a few times, but the guy is from Australia so there is absolutely no doubt that he has been ripped to pieces all his life, he takes it well, after all it is a very funny name.

Wan King Man. Heh heh heh

Anyway, purile jokes aside, we all ended up getting stupidly drunk on many an occasion and generally having a jolly good time.

We convinced Kim to come visit us in KL on an extended stay type idea, then when the holiday was over we both went back to our appartment.

A few days after going back Kim came over to stay with us. We kept on with our marvelloiusly unemplyed holiday vibe (exept vanessa went and got a job a day after we got back) by drinking lots and all being tourists in KL. King only lives a mile or so from our place so we have all kept going out on the lash and doing other such work avoiding tasks as laying around in the hammocks and going ice skating.

The ice skating was fun, as it's been years since I dared to but unfortunately the random flailing of a very large (and now slightly portly due to to much good food and laying around in hammocks) white boy did little for his ailing knee. Yes the silly sod forgot he had a bad knee and ice skating mashed it up quite a bit. Well not the skating so much as the flailing around and falling onto my arse repeatedly.
Now a week later I have a bandage on it and the swelling is just starting to goo down.

Silly boy.

This weekend we went down to Malacca, which is a brilliant town absolutely chock full of history.

I'll tell you all about that next time cos now I've got to go eat dinner.

love to all

timbo