TBA Day 6: Tom Jones = Role Model

Today was one of those lovely contented days that I've been experiencing so often on this trip so far...

On the way home from dinner last night, Ringo drove us past the place to get the good laksa (Jonker Dessert 88), which turned out to be only about 2.5 blocks from the hostel over very flat ground, making it fairly walking-distance. I decided to venture over there for breakfast this morning and get my laksa fix. Ringo feels I should have ordered the Seafood Curry Laksa, but I'd been wanting to try asam laksa and had heard that the Nyonya Asam Laksa here was pretty darn good, so I went that route (even though the asam laksa is more of a Penang thing, apparently, and I'll be in Penang soon enough...). I'm used to curry laksa with its much creamier coconut-milk based broth, but the asam laksa is less creamy and has a nice lime-y sourness to it. Super-yummy and definitely something I hadn't tried before.
As I was eating my breakfast, two backpackers who had been at dinner with me the night before wandered in for their last meal in Melaka and joined me at the table. They ordered one of each of the two laksas I'd been deciding between and, upon seeing the curry laksa, I decided I'll go back tomorrow and try that one as well. When we finished eating, they called Ringo for help getting a cab to the bus depot. He came by the restaurant and then arranged that the cab take me back to the hostel (for free) on its way to the bus depot. Because he's awesome like that.

On a side note, the backpackers had seen me use my FlipStick when we were waiting in line for dinner last night and apparently thought it was the coolest thing ever. It was pretty cute watching them mime to Ringo (while speaking something I don't speak and can't accurately identify) how I was able to just unfold my stool and sit right down. Ringo translated that they wanted the ordering information, so apparently the FlipStick is awesome in any language and will soon be sweeping Asia...

The "plan," (if you're one of those silly people who insists on "planning" things) for the day was to hop on a touristy bus thingy after breakfast and tool around the city a bit... but I got a good amount of tourism in yesterday on my trishaw and was really getting more of a sitting-around-with-a-book kind of vibe from the day than a spending-half-the-day-waiting-at-bus-stops-in-the-sweltering-heat vibe... Thus, below was my view for most of the day (the parts when I wasn't destroying the earth by blasting the A/C in my room and reading under a cozy blanket, that is).
At one point while reading in the common area, Ringo came through and I asked him about the framed picture of Tom Jones hanging on the wall behind me. It turns out it's there because Tom Jones is a great role model for all of us. Apparently he was homeless and starving when somebody gave him his big break, he impressed the right music industry people, and the rest, as they say, is history... Now, some of you fact-checkers may notice that this is not the story you find in places such as Wikipedia (he was the child of poor coal-miners, though...), but who am I to tarnish somebody's image of their role model? The utter cheesiness of Tom Jones always puts a smile on my face, so I like that the picture is there...

One last example of the awesomeness of Ringo: I needed to grab some more Malaysian money before heading to KL, but apparently the only ATMs are at banks and banks are far from the hostel. So Ringo, being awesome, drove me to the bank, and then (since I hadn't gone on the bus tour) gave me a little car tour of the sites until he got called back to work. Awesome.

I don't have to leave until 10:30am to catch my train tomorrow (giving me just enough time for delicious breakfast laksa), and I don't seem to have any form of food poisoning (yet?) so I'm optimistic that tomorrow's day of travel may be more pleasant than my day getting to Melaka...

After dinner update:
And... Even a mellow, not-so-OCD Emily is still very much an introvert. Wow. Ringo was taking the 6 new lodgers to dinner. It was a ways away so he was going to walk them there, then come back and drive me there to meet them... then the place was closed and he took them to the same place as last night. OK... I'll still go to be social... That was a bad idea. I'm so deeply exhausted right now and have been since I got to dinner. I wasn't particularly hungry so I ended up mostly trying to pretend to be perky and social. Ringo felt bad about dragging me to the same place and insisted on taking me past the place with the best poh piah in town (and in Malaysia in general, according to him). I was like "Dude, I'm so freaking tired. Can I please just go home and go to bed?" No. That was not going to work. We got the poh piah (a vegetarian wrap thingy) as take away, he dropped me back at the hostel, I took a bite, and... Well, that's actually pretty darn delicious. You win, Ringo.
I am now in my air-conditioned room with the door locked, and they're going to have to pick the lock and drag me out of here if they want me to be social any more today (Ringo seems to think we'll all be hanging out later tonight... when I will be sleeping...). Sigh... I'm looking forward to the semi-solitude of a travel day tomorrow. I think it will be at least a day before I'm ready to interact with people again...

TBA Day 5: Melaka State of Mind

Dude. This place is so mellow (in a really good way). I have a tendency to be a bit… um… “intense” about things, but after my first full day here I just can’t seemed to get too bothered about things. I think in Singapore I sort of had a “to do” list of places I had to go, and (although I had an awesome time) it didn’t really feel like a vacation. Melaka totally feels like a vacation. Ringo (whose actual name is apparently not Ringo, but I’ll stick with calling him that anyway for the sake of continuity) was going to take me to the best laksa place in town tonight but apparently they’re closed, so he promised I can try it tomorrow… This is the type of thing that I would typically find extremely exasperating, but thanks to my new Melaka attitude I was just like “Darn. Well, OK… Whatever…” when he told me that my plans had been thwarted. It’s highly impractical to be in a hurry here or to try to be on a schedule. You may think (and I did think, until today) that would drive an OCD kid like me insane, but it’s actually extremely refreshing.

Today for lunch Ringo was going to order some satays from the (allegedly) famous shop two doors over for me (to save me a trip down the stairs) but they were closed (places seem to be open/closed somewhat arbitrarily here) so he took me down to the place next door for dim sum and brought his own whole-leaf Chinese tea to have with my meal. He got me hooked up then wandered off to deal with new people checking in. It turned out to be more than one person could reasonably eat, but for US$3.50 it still seemed like a good deal. The steamed things were sort of average, but the fried things were super-delicious. Sad that that’s so often the way of things…

After lunch I decided to fully embrace my tourist nature, so Ringo hooked me up with a trishaw ride, pedaled by the tiny old man pictured below:
Apparently you often have to wander out to the trishaw place, but he made sure the guy could pick me up and drop me off at the hostel, which I really appreciated. It was a pretty nice mellow way to see the city. He took me past all the temples and tourist attractions and pointed to indicate when I really ought to be taking pictures. What I hadn’t anticipated was being forced to have my picture taken at pretty much every tourist spot. He didn’t speak English well enough to understand that this really wasn’t necessary, but I now have a collection of maybe 30 pictures in the category “Emily standing in front of things looking increasingly hot and tired” (example below) from my 2-hour trishaw ride. I have a theory that if I shuffled the pictures you would be able to put them in chronological order to within 10 minutes based on the degree of hot-and-tiredness that is evident…
Nonetheless, there were lots of cool (and really old) buildings and 300-year-old streets to be seen, and it was fun getting a closer look at the city.

After a couple hours recovering in the A/C of my room with a book, it was time for dinner (even if that dinner was not going to involve the best laksa in Melaka). Ringo took me and four other lodgers to Capitol Satay, which is apparently a place we would eternally regret having missed if we didn't go... (Because Ringo is awesome, he drove us over since it was too far for a kid like me to walk.)
It’s one of those places where you have a big pot of the satay “gravy” boiling away in the middle of the table and you choose meats and veggies on sticks to dunk in it to cook… Sort of like fondue except with spicy, peanuty goodness… Each stick was US$0.20, including the giant (like 6”) prawns you can barely see in the background of the second picture below (in which “Ringo” is explaining how eat something…). He also taught us how to peel said shrimp using only our teeth while holding the skewer, which is apparently how it's done. The losers at the other tables only got tiny pathetic shrimp, but Ringo knows people so we got the giant-prawn-and-abalone treatment at our table (still for just 20 cents/skewer). It was fun to hang with other backpackers, and I love that Ringo is so dedicated to making sure his guests enjoy themselves and have good food…
It’s funny. The whole reason I came to Melaka was for the laksa (and, mark my words, I will be trying some tomorrow with or without Ringo’s help), and before I got here I would have told you that coming to Melaka would be a complete waste of time if I didn’t get to try Melaka-style laksa… But, you know… It’s really not going to kill me if the laksa thing doesn’t happen, and I’ll still be extremely glad I came to check out Melaka. It’s like people are always telling me (for some reason), life is too short to stress about the little stuff… My response to pretty much anything bad that comes up now is "Eh. Whatever. It will all work out somehow..."

As I’ve always said the opposite of (but now find oddly true): Plans are for losers, dude.