Cowboy Caleb the liberal arts, grown-up stuff & random mischief

Cowboy Caleb Visits Malacca

I spent the weekend in Malacca, Malaysia which is about a 2 hour drive away from Singapore. This sleepy little town is a historical city. If you’ve never been there before, you’ll feel right at home because there are (too) many Singaporeans driving about in their cars enjoying the weekend. Most of the signboards are in English and the locals speak English.

view from my balcony

2 days before I arrived in Malacca, I booked a room in Mahkota hotel via my favourite hotel booking website Wotif.com. The hotel is actually (I think) converted from a block of condominiums. The room I stayed in was a 1 bedroom apartment, with a kitchen and guest hall. Very strange. The room wasn’t particularly clean (the bathtub was filthy) and they required a RM400 deposit for a broadband connection in the room!!! For RM228/night, I’d think this hotel was overpriced if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was located next to the shopping district + historical attractions. But then again, the spanking new Holiday Inn is just next door and is charging nearly the same rates.

Anyway the main reason I was in Malacca was to attend a wedding banquet. The food wasn’t particularly good and I spent most of the night fiddling with my Blackberry placing football bets (it was a Saturday night). A huge bunch of old folks got drunk and told everybody that they had been ex-schoolmates for 50 years which then made me realized that most folk from Malacca were content to live out their entire lives here.

Because the wedding banquet left a lot to be desired in gastronomical terms, after that I went looking for the famous Malacca Satay Celup. I went to a place called McQueks near my hotel.

What you do is select the food you want, which is pierced on a wooden skewer much like a kebab and then you lower it into a boiling pot of satay (peanut) sauce. The service here was pretty bad (the boss needs to go on prozac) so I would recommend you visit the Satay Celup store at Capitol Street instead.

The next day before I drove home, I stopped at the famous KSA shop for some Tau Sar Piah (black bean cookies) and Teh Beh Soh (sticky buns) because they have a reputation for being the best in Malacca.

Malacca is a really nice place to live. The pace of life is slow, the people are generally polite and the standard of living is quite high as evidenced by the abundant number of eateries and shopping malls. If you’ve never been to Malacca, now is a good time with the relatively cool weather.

b4 u recommend anything, can at least make sure what u r recommending ka?

tau sar peah is NOT made from black beans, it;s made from red beans if u meant the bao variety or green mung beans if u meant the penang variety.

fucking idiot.

Try living there for 17 years. Than again, most Malaccans won’t mind that. LOSERS!