Do enjoy my wall of text or the pictures, or a bit of both. Or have none of it. I promise I will try to be more short worded sometimes..

So our first trip away from Singapore would be the city of Melaka (Melacca, Malaca – so many spellings) on the west cost of Malaysia about three and a half hours away from the border of Singapore. For myself, I left my room in a hurry after a quite confusing week with ups and downs, trying to find my place and the ground beneath my feet. More about that in later posts.

I got some handy advice that I should try to slow it down in my head, be patient and focus on why I came here. A minute later I was in the midst of crossing the border to Malaysia trying to catch a bus at the border city of Johor Bahru (which would be quite impossible because of the slow immigration process and the fact we were late in the first place). At Johor Bahru station, we took some wrong turns and ended up catching a taxi to the other bus terminal, were we missed our bus, bought tickets for the next and almost missed that one as well. So much for settling down and finding my place. Oh well.

We found ourselves in Melaka, at the hostel of Jalan-Jalan guesthouse (yes I’m marketing this great place) drinking beer with the people running the place and fellow backpackers. Our little welcome party was just great, getting some traveling advice, sharing stories and listening to tons of experiences from the continent we all, in different ways, can call our temporary home. I haven’t even scratched the surface of its content, but I’m definitely growing a weak spot for it already. Melaka is a city filled with various cultural history and richness, and is rightly among the UNESCO world heritages. We visited many different design shops, boutiques, art studios and workshops, craftsmen’s studios and listened to some fascinating stories about the history behind their work and the workload put into it. It all felt so genuine seeing some of the process leading up to the products lined up in the small shop spaces. It is quite rare we do that with anything materialistic we eventually buy or invest in.

After a long day, and almost longer walk to the ”floating Mosque” that was situated west from the central areas of Melaka on a little island, we ended up meeting some locales. I don’t believe to much in coincidence. In so many ways you create your luck or end up at those ”random” places because of the small choices you did in the past and because you leap out of your comfort zone or bubble. The three locals (if I may say that) we met were from Malaysia and Indonesia, who also met up just that very day. We ended up getting a ride back and shared a great dinner with the craziest, mouth watering, sweet, filled naan bread ever. Oh my. And I really hope we meet our new overly pleasant and nice friends again on future travels.

The parallel street to where our hostel was situated, a local night market (Jonker night market) opens up on the weekend with food stalls, clothing, souvenirs, handcrafts, everything coconut, you name it. I had a weekly budget and I had all intentions of using it all up, the prices here are unreal both compared to Singapore and of course back home. A lot of things are designed, made and sold only in Melaka.

For me, buying genuine stuff, supporting and appreciating the locals work and survival just makes the things much more worth and meaningful.

Seriously the world needs more contact with real stuff and people rather than fakes and copycats – who’s core ideas and concepts is based upon taking other ideas, selling it for ten or twenty times the price to audience who couldn’t be bothered by the actual value or labor put into it. It’s just one thing that makes us more anonymous to the world and the things around us. Yea I also buy (some) replicas, or not exactly knowing where things come from. Though I do have a quite OK view of where all my stuff comes from and almost all of what I hang up on my walls or that fills my home is from markets or local places around the world. So go ahead and criticizing me for being human, it’s just a fair point i would say.

Back to Melaka. Overall our stay was great. We saw a lot, met some really friendly people that just blew ”easygoing” out of the window. Being away for a weekend like this was a great way of gaining perspective of where we really are in this vast ocean of differentiated people and environments. I do believe that Singapore is a red dot, bordered to another world it tries to compete with and stand out from. In some way as much as possible. I’m looking forward to experience both sides of the coin.

The pictures speak for themselves. A bit chaotic, car dominated city, with a lot of most, and fantastic street arts. Why so much is here I don’t know, but they say this city is quite like Georgetown (further north in Malaysia), and I don’t know if the government is very liberal to it, which would make this a common theme through Malaysia maybe, or if they just don’t have the resources to put effort into taking it down.

Looking stunning as ever at this holy place, a selfie was a must.