16th March 2010
We awoke this morning to more activity across the street in the food market. A really bustling little place with people calling in for breakfast as they start the day.
I am finding Malaysia quite different from Singapore. It is certainly not as clean and well ordered as Singapore, especially in the old part of town where we are staying. The streets have open gutters and pavements are few and far between, meaning you have to have your wits about you when walking about as there are loads of cars on the roads.
Since Chinatown is supposedly one of Melaka’s most interesting and scenic areas this was where we wanted to explore today. We started off in town square where the bright-red Christ Church stands as testiment to the areas Dutch settlers. The square was full of brightly coloured tri-shaws, some featuring a huge sound system with blaring music. Small market stalls selling tourist goods also featured heavily around the edges of the square.
Uninterested in mass produced gifts, we continued onto Chinatown. The main street, Jonker Street was full of shops selling everything from chopsticks to wooden giraffes, so we headed down some of the small backstreets. These are wonderfully preserved and contain family shop houses and traditional buildings, as well as a range of temples.
One of the most famous temples in Chinatown is Cheng Hoon Teng which dates back to 1646. This is Malaysia’s oldest Chinese temple and all materials used in its building were imported from China. It has recently been restored and is wonderfully ornate, with red and gold decorations and incense in the air.
In fact, incense follows you on the air in this particular street in Chinatown. It is also known as Harmony Street because Temples and Mosques of the three main religions of Malaysia are located peacefully in the same small street.
We stepped inside the entrances to most of the temples, although for the most part didn’t actually progress into the inner part of the building where people were praying. The temples feature such rich adornment and architecture, along with varying sizes of insense sticks.
Down one of the small streets we stumbled on a pottery shop where they actually had a workshop out the back. In contrast to many of the shops we’ve entered both here and in Singapore, we were left to browse their small selection of craftwork at our own pace. We had been there a good 10 minutes before the shopkeeper appeared, he showed us the workshop where a lady was working on another piece. We took a fancy to a lovely piece of pottery of a traditional Babya Nona house in Chinatown which was in a frame. Now we just need to find a way to get it home in one piece!
We started to make our way to the mall for something to eat and on our way we walked past the memorial to independence for Malaysia. This was set in a rare pedestrianized area of the city alongside the Sultanate’s Palace Museum.
This museum is housed in a wooden building which is a modern reconstruction of the palace of the sultans of Malacca. The building is made of hardwood while the roof is made of ‘belian’ wood. An interesting feature of the building is that no nails were used in the construction of the building, only wooden pegs.
By now it was late afternoon and very hot. For some cool downtime we went to the cinema to see Alice in Wonderland in 3D for the princely sum of £6 for both of us (we had to pay extra for 3D). A really excellent film with a whole host of stars.