Year of the Yat: Singapore Part 2: Trip to Malacca Malaysia (And Tiffany tries DURIAN!)!

Malacca Malaysia is the second largest city in Malaysia and has Western, Chinese, Indian and Muslim influences throughout its history. This means there were great hindu and buddhist temples, old Dutch churches, mosques and very diverse architecture.

St Paul's church ruins. A little funny as there are St. Paul ruins in Macau too.

The inside was pretty cool, as there were headstones in various old writing-styles and languages with pretty extensive descriptions.

landscape . . .

Colonial governor's mansion, which is now a museum:

Colonial governor's rolls...

Cool old wooden ship docked at the river that cuts through the center of the city:

Front of St Pauls.

Really pretty views from St. Pauls, which is on a hill.

Here is the Dutch church. The inside was more plain than other churches we have visited, but single wooden beams spanned the width of the church's ceiling, each carved from a single tree.

More pretty views in the city center:

and temples (we love the detailed architecture):

You can kind of see how all the cultures added their own touch - this is very chinese looking, but the church looked very colonial:

What a hottie! (Can you tell that James is writing this post?)

There were rickshaws EVERYWHERE. They were pretty funny too. Had boom boxes on the back and would ride you around blaring hip hop.

Since we're not making it to the terra cotta warriors, this was the closest Tiffany might get to a picture with something similar. I bet the workers here really liked Tiffany holding the statutes hand.

As you can see, not much has changed with how Tiffany feels about animals. I wish I could have snapped a picture when she saw her first monkey on the side of the road.

Looking hard in front of the tanks....

In Malaysia, its pretty common to see McDonalds VIP drive through stickers on cars.... WHAT? We have no idea what this means, but found it hilarious:

Most of the 3 hour ride through Malaysia consisted of HUGE palm tree farms. Palm trees are Malaysia's biggest cash crop. They harvest it for palm oil and wood. Very pretty scenery.

This is pretty much the view the whole ride from Singapore to Melaka (all 3 hours worth).

And HERE is the durian ice cream. When we got back from Melaka, it was dinner time and we wanted to eat like locals. So we popped into a Hawker Center. A hawker center is an open food court with TONS of types of food. One of my friends here in Hong Kong described it best as - a place with all these stalls where one guy has been making the same dish for the last 50 years, making him just about the best at making that dish as good gets. It was a pretty 'interesting dish' all together. Beans on the bottom with shaved ice on top, with a few types of snowball syrup, then the custard-looking stuff on top is durian with corn in it. So strange. When we ordered it, the worker actually laughed at us and watched us taste it.