Malacca

Malacca is Malaysia's most "historical" city. Non-Sequitur if ever I heard one. Been stuck here for 3 days now, so it must have something...

Malaysia is rather strange. It's like one of those pantomine horses, where one pair of legs wants to go forwards and one wants to go back. But in our case we have at least three pairs of legs - a pantomine octopus if you will. The legs are naturally the Chinese, the Indians and the Malayans. Each with their own religion, culture, cuisine and problems.

The first thing the Taxi driver (Chinese) said to me in KL was "I am going to bring you to a Chinese hotel because you just can't trust those bloody muslims". Last night an Indian said to me "When you go home make sure you tell everybody that there are no problems here and that we all get on with each other very well". Paranoid. They do get on ok, you see Indians in Halal restaurants and Malayans in Indian restaurants, but they do like to hang around with their own kind (who doesn't). So you have Indian quarters and Chinese quarters. Even down to street level - walk along the Jalan Mubad and you will see only Indians and Indian shops, take the next left and you are on a Chinese street with lanterns hanging everywhere. One huge advantage of this cultural diversity is the cuisine (here I go again), so you will get Indian food with some wonderful Chinese spices or Malaysian food with a slight touch of curry.

On the cunning lingustics front, Malaysian is a weird mix of english, dutch, portugese with an arabic touch.
Counter is Kaunter, Engine is Injin
Police is Polis (same in Dutch I think)
Fireman is Bomba (a latin word)
Water is Air (a real brain twister)
and on the arabic side of things there is one word for "Older brother", one word for "Older sister" and one word for "Younger brother / sister".