A great day out

Yesterday was sooooo amaaaazing!!
well, yes, indeed it was.

we set out around 8.30 in the morning to go down from KL to Port Dickson, a small beach on the west coast with nothing much apart from the seashore, and later Melaka, the historical city of Malaysia.
The Port Dickson trip was actually part of a school gathering; Choy, Dominique, and Xiao Ma, my hosts for the day, led me to join 80 other law students on the beach and play a few games, like volleyball and "guess what/who Im trying to imitate". quite a lot of fun. Since Malaysia is a very religious country, most of the girls attending wore a headscarf, and though it was a bit surprising for me to see the majority wearing it, it became sort of natural after some time. It's just part of their daily lives, I won't have a say in it.
In the sea, a few families were swimming, women fully clothed on. Men and children wore only swimsuit.
The beach was very nice, white sand, extremely fine, and we walked all the lenght of it, and back again. Before we knew it, Choy and I were quite burned. Actually, he was rather okay with his darker tan, but got sunburnt on the nose (everybody kept telling me"hold your nose! it's going to fall any minute now!"), and behind the legs, which is actually very painful every time you want to sit.
The student gathering was for me just another demonstration of how diverse the country is, people showing so many different origins: Indonesia, India, China, indigenous Malays from the peninsula, indigenous from Borneo Island... all tones of skin color, all with different accents, different native mother tongues. They address these differences as "races", but it does not cayy the same meaning as in French, so people will not get offended by that term.
we had lunch in Melaka: typical, local "chicken rice", which consists of a half chicken cut into slices, served with riceballs, cucumber, and chili sauce. Grab a wood stick, pick a piece of chicken and add a rice ball at the end, dip it in the sauce... yummy!!
Xiao Ma guided us throug the city, because he comes from there, and invited us to that restaurant. Later on, we bumped into a dutch brass band playing some jazz classics, an impressively tall Dutch woman coordinating a painting class for beginners on a public plazza, and we ended up in the inevitable Chinatown.
Every medium-sized or larger city here has its Chinatown neighbourhood, since Chinese make up for around 30% of the population, on average.
At the very top of the main hill of Melaka, one can see the relatively well preserved remains of the Portuguese church, and a few tombstones of Dutch traders and explorers.
we did visit everything, or close, and retreated from the burning-hot sun into a local cafe to eat pineapple tart, a specialty of the city which is just as good as the name allows you to imagine :) we took a box for the trip back to Kuala Lumpur.
The city has a traditional architecture, the colonial influence is visible. It has been adapted to deal with the sun ad monsoon rains, also. Though the city was colonized successively by the Portuguese, the British ad the Dutch, it is the latter whose influence is most visible today.
To end a good day, we went for dinner at a Satay restaurant: choose sticks from a giant fridge, whicever you want: squid, pork, local type of bread, vegetables, tofu, chicken, prawns... then throw them in the hotpot in the middle of the table. after a few minutes, you can take them out and enjoy your freshly cooked dinner with cucumber and rice.
I recommend this trip to anyone who is going in the area of Melaka, it is really "depaysant". the beach in Port Dickson is nicer, and offers some sailing opportunities.