You have beautiful skin!

The last two days were not too exciting. Yesterday I wandered around KL to visit a few places I hadnt been to before and today I took an early bus to the ancient colonial city of Melaka about 150 Kilometers South of KL.

KFC is huge in Malaysia. Besides McDonald's it seems to be the Fast Food Chain with the most outlets around here and this one even has it's own bus stop. "Western Food" as it is called here is pretty expensive though, the BigMac at McDonalds costing something around 2,50€ which gets you a full meal including drinks at a local restaurant. I still couldnt resist to buy a few donuts at the Krispy Kreme outlet I stumbled upon in a mall yesterday... so good!


Another western influence around here. People love football but as Malaysia does not really sport any high-class teams people dig the English Premier league, especially Manchester United. You can see countless people in ManU Jerseys and one of the cabs I took in Langkawi even had an official ManU "Red Devils" Fanclub sticker on the windshield. Foo told me that when the Malaysian national team played against ManU last year everybody in the stadium was rooting for ManU and not their own national team...

View of the Petronas towers and the national theater from Lake Titiwangsa in the North of KL.

View from the rooftop terrace of my hostel in Chinatown. Nice place to read a book.

Town square and center of colonial Melaka with a Christian church, which is a rare sight around here. The city used to be the most important port in SE-Asia due to it's location at one of the narrowest points in the Strait of Melaka between Malaysia and Sumatra and therefore several colonial powers fought for the power over the city. In recent years the strait was best known as hotspot of modern piracy. It was under Dutch, Portuguese and English reign in it's long history and large communities of Chinese traders also left their marks in the city. The church in the picture was built by the Dutch.


The fountain in the middle of the square is dedicated to Queen Victoria. Proof of English colonial influence.

The large town hall is still called by it's Dutch name "Stadthuys" today.


The town center is completely overrun with large groups of noisy Chinese and Japanese tourists spilling from tour busses.

One of the many Buddhist and Taoist temples in Chinatown. The carved stone pillars are really impressive at close-up distance.

The last remaining part of the Portuguese Fort that once dominated the city is. The Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie VOC) later planted their own coat of arms on it and the English eventually destroyed the whole fort leaving only this gate standing. A creole version of Portuguese called Kristang is still spoken by some people in the Melaka area.

This is the building that once housed the local English Club where the colonial "masters" used to gather is now ironically used as the "Proclamation of Independence Memorial".

In another Museum about Malaysian Architecture one of the security guys came up to me and asked me where I was from. I told him Germany and the next thing he does is the Hitler salute (he used the wrong hand though). Very weird but he obviously had no idea what that gesture stood for so I gave him a very short roundup of German Nazi history. Anyway we got to talk a little and he asked me for how long I had been in Malaysia. I told him only a few days and then he said that he could see that because my "skin was still beautiful" and that in a few weeks it was going to be all red and dark so that people back home wouldnt even recognize me anymore... I had to force myself not to laugh :D Still, he was really nice and explained some things about the museum and about the upcoming festival of Hari Raya to me.

Alright, I will say goodbye to Christine now, she will fly to Cuba tomorrow for studying there and then go to bed...