melaka... etc...

I've just spoken to my mum on the phone and she said it would be better if I updated here little and often rather than in really big occasional stories... I'm not sure if this is going to work... as quite a descriptive person, i find it fairly difficult to tell stories (as many of you will be all to aware) briefly... to single out the important points and stick to them... ensuring that the focus of whatever i'm trying to say gets across to the listener (or reader)... also as I write this blog I get excited that people are actually reading what I'm putting on here, and as a result of this excitment i don't want people to feel like i'm selling them short, so i try to cram in as much detail as possible...

however, in spite of all this, I'm going to try to update everyone on the events of the weekend as well as what we've been doing since, briefly and concisely...



so we (myself, todd and a guy called JR who is from the phillipines and currently doing a masters degree in engineering at UM) set off for melaka on saturday morning... we encountered a strange thing at the bus station, we got a certain type of ticket for the bus, which whilst really cheap... seemed to be a bit of a gamble... if there were spare seats just before the bus set off then we were allowed to occupy them... and if not, then we didn't and had to go and buy new tickets (we only found out this is how they worked after we payed for them)... as it happened there were three seats left as the bus was leaving (that's right! the perfect number for the three of us!) so we took them gladly, rejoicing in our thrifty good fortune...

I'll spare the details of the coach journey except to say that it was during the trip that I saw my first wild monkey, just sitting at the side of the road... it actually made me feel a little excited...



Melaka is a very historical city so we walked about in blisteringly hot heat looking at historical stuff, we saw the malaysian independence memorial, a dutch and a portuguese church, the ruins of the church of st paul (in which was a local busker, singing a fairly good version of Hotel California by The Eagles)... we had lunch, which was Malay food, unfortunately it was too spicy for me to eat on such a hot day, after lunch we walked about some more and saw some more really cool stuff... we had our picture taken with a massive snake, which was both scary and fun... reducing the three of us to nervous giggling throughout...



We were crossing a bridge over a river and looked over the edge and saw a collection of absolutely MASSIVE lizards either on the banks of the river or swimming about in it, I didn't even realise they existed that big, but there they were, totally wild, swimming about...

We went to a really cool night market on a street called "jonker street" which is famous for its antiques as well as its night market... there was so much brilliant stuff so it was a good opportunity to do some souvenir shopping... we also saw some stalls selling pet scorpians and tarantulas...



The next morning (we stayed in a questionable hotel, suffice to say that we had no window in our room, and although it advertised having television this was questionable as the television didn't actually work) we went to Christ Church Melaka (as it was Sunday morning) ... its a Anglican Church and the service was thoroughly enjoyable... encouraging us all...



We went to a replica of the sultanate palace, then had some lunch (the famous chicken rice balls - which we agreed that we weren't quite sure why they were so famous here, only to be told later that we got them from the wrong place)... it was so hot though and we'd seen a lot that we decided to get the bus back to KL and have a look round there in the afternoon when it was a little cooler...

KL was pretty uneventful as it was raining... we rushed through china town and then had a quick look round the central market but we were all pretty tired so got a bus back to Millennium Court (where JR lives) and then said goodbye to him and got a lift back here...

I realise that wasn't really that brief and yet I somehow managed to miss out a lot of stuff that we did (for example i didn't explain the differing interiors on the coach down to Melaka and the coach back up...) sorry mum...!

I'm tired now so won't explain what I've done since the weekend... although English Class went very well last night and the number of people attending doubled from two to six :-) Thanks for your prayers!

Hang on a second... I got my hair cut on Sunday evening and I have to tell about it...

The place was pretty cool... while you waited you had headphones and could pick which of 4 different televisions on the wall you wanted to get the sound from... The guy had a little difficulty knowing what to do with my thick, curly hair so in the end he just shaved it off... when he finished he got out a hoover (vacuum cleaner for our US friends) and proceeded not to hoover the floor but to hoover my head! and... my face! very strange! Then (which I found a little wierder)... he got out a big, dry, yellow, car sponge and wiped my head with it, I really couldn't tell you why... finally he showed me to a self-service hair washing station, which i managed to use quite successfully without getting my clothes all wet!