CC's blog: Goodbye Party Ellie & Malacca

On Monday we held a party for Ellie who is leaving Singapore :-( We had a BBQ at our condo and it ended up being a really lovely evening. Priscilla, a Singaporean girl, brought her some durians because nobody can say they have actually experienced Singapore without eating one. I can honestly say that was an experience to never forget ... To give you some side information, durian is the fruit that is forbidden to take into taxi's and the metro ... Why? ... well the first time somebody told me "do you smell this, this is the smell of durian" I replied "I never knew I smelt it so many times before, I always thought it was the smell of garbage". This hopefully gives you an idea. Well tasting it wasn't much better. It was like a combination of garlic and onions that have gone bad for weeks :-) But besides the awful taste and the awful burping you get from it we got some great pictures out of it and at least we can say we've tried it once in our lives :-)

Ellie & Priscilla

Priscilla & Wim

... and me

The next day, me and Ellie left for Malacca for a few days and had to be at the bus station at 8am ... which isn't that early but early enough for two zombies who still suffered from drinking too much wine the night before ;-)

We arrived in Malacca with the sun shining and as soon as we had checked into the hotel and stepped outside it started raining ... great! ... we still decided to do some sightseeing because there were so many "must-sees" on the map that we couldn't waste any time because we were only there for 4 days ... little did we know we would have finished 3/4th of them after an hour :-)

The day after the sun was shining again and Malacca turned out to be a cute little town with nice houses and cheap little restaurants but 2 days is really the maximum anyone (that isn't above the age of 75) should spend there.

So we went into the tourist office and asked them about the tours we could do from there and they gave us back a look like we came from another planet ... they replied us there wasn't much else to do but the city centre. We could take a sightseeing bus to drive us to all the things there were to see in the centre ... the same things me and Ellie did by foot the day before in less than 2 hours ... can you believe that.

Anyway we decided to do the river cruise that one of our friends Alice advised us and when this was finished there was a guy handing out leaflets of tours around Malacca ... great! Our savior!

So he picked us up the next day at 9am and there was another Irish girl that joined us. Our first stop on the tour was an island (sounds exotic) that actually turned out to be an abandoned housing project on some sort of a hand made island with 1 mosque on it and about 50 empty apartment buildings. A great investment for us according to the guide who could already see him and his three new Western wives living there. Later that afternoon he would share with us that he had a friend who had two wives and while they worked all he had to do was take care of the kids which was great according to him because then he could watch TV all day ... you can imagine the kind of looks went back and forth between us girls :-)

Next stop we went to the jungle ... I already got a comment from him that my shoes were not appropriate to go hiking in the jungle which was kind of weird considering the jungle turned out to be a stone path through a regular forest. Here we got bombarded with questions like "Do you know what that is?" ... Euhm, yes a banana tree "have you ever eaten bananas?" Euhm, yes who hasn't? "Do you know what that is?" Euhm, yes an ants nest! I think he thought he could share all of is wisdom with the young Western girls ... me and Ellie were so ready to go back after this. In the forest he kept making comments about us moving there to come live with him, he even introduced us as his future wives to other visitors there. Ellie replied quickly "don't listen to him, the man's crazy" :-) Back in the car he drove by the place were we could get the visum if we were going to marry him ... and this continued all the way. He was supposed to drop us off at a water park that afternoon but we could already imagine him sitting next to us 'keeping an eye on things' so we asked him to just drop us back at the hotel. But he wouldn't before also showing us a Malaysian factory (?!?) and Malaysian houses (?!?) after about the 50th house which was either an old house, a new house or a Chinese house according to the wise guide, I was praying for this to end ;-)

After also asking if we would go to the disco with him (No!) or maybe the supermarket then? (No!) and after he drove by his "villa" (which if he hadn't bought, he would be so rich that all he had to do was wave his money and all the girls would sleep with him ... euhm sure man, they call them prostitutes) he gave up and just dropped us back off at our hotel ... we spend our last afternoon going to the cinema and were already counting the minutes we could leave Malacca.

But except for Malacca being small with not much to do I enjoyed spending the last days with Ellie there before she leaves Singapore ... I'm really going to miss her!