CHINESE NEW YEAR 2010

It is the year of the Tiger, and the eponymous beer company seems to be the major sponsor. We hung out in a place called Geographers Café on Jin Hang Jebat, a corner location with outside seating and icy cold Tiger drafts. The food, the service, everything seems to work at this place. We especially liked the Nasi Lemak here, which is the national dish of Malaysia.

Rangerette had her fortune told by a parrot. The guy lets it out of the cage, and he has a stack of cards, he says her name, and the bird picks a card, he keeps this up until the parrot doesn’t pick anymore. He thereafter reads the message on the card, which luckily for us was one of good fortune and some money coming in!
The Karabau Rock bar was our alternative late night bar, very local and friendly place. They have live music on the weekends.

Every Friday and Saturday the Jonker Street Night Market is held. Early in the afternoon they start setting up the stalls, and by the time evening falls you can hardly walk down the streets of China Town. They have everything from soup to nuts, sewing needles to deserts that glow in the dark. They have creams and ointments, that will either make your skin soft or you can wake up in the morning looking like the Elefant Man. We liked the Hawker food stalls. We started at one end and ate our way up and down the streets. From Dim Sum to deep fried eggs in batter, we ate dried meat that was grilled(rougan), baby squid grilled on a charcoal grill, Mmmm! My favorite are Pao(steamed pork buns), giant dim sum. Rangerette's favorite was a concoction called Cendol, made of of shaved ice, with green day glow jellies, syrups and coconut milk, looks digusting but tastes, well, less disgusting. By this time, Rangerette started, she said “Ranger Bob you keep grazing like this, and they’re going to start Homesteading on your butt”…“Hate to plow that lower 40” I retorted…

Sitting in an outdoor café, we watched the colorful trishaws decorated with plastic flowers and blinking lights. Some even had disco music. The people go by on motorbikes with their jackets on backwards as protection from the cool night air and insects, it’s quite quiet, laid back and calm for a major Malaysian town…Life is good, but where am I going…Guess I’ll take another Tiger by the tale…

Chinese New Year was packed everywhere, but I thought we would see dragon dancing and firecrackers exploding all over the place, but alas not one… Apparently, the way to celebrate is to eat a giant meal with your extended family. Every restaurant in Melaka was booked by out of town Chinese from Kuala Lumpur or Singapore. The young people go out and drink in cafés and bars afterwards. We sat at the Geographers Café and made friends with an Australian couple. Both taught at universities. Her hobby was singing, and she sang with the one-man house band and belted out incredibly good renditions of many, especially Tina Turner.
They have these beer girls, from the different beer companies. They go around to the tables at the cafés and try to get you to order their kind of beer; they keep pouring the beer as fast as you as you can drink it. In Malaysia, they are very discreet, but in Vietnam, they are a nuisance, too pushy. We ate dinner at the new boutique hotel called courtyard@heeren I had earlier in the day checked out their rooms which were fantastic. The suite especially, with an inside/outside bathroom with Balinese shower at 300 MR was a bargain. The restaurant, on the other hand, was a great disappointment. The food was less than mediocre. My chicken was dry and Rangerette had a pasta that was so small it wouldn’t fill a dwarf in a Fellini Film! My advice: Book the room and eat elsewhere until they get it together in the kitchen…
We stayed out until the wee hours, but knew we couldn’t let completely go, because we were taking an early taxi the next day back to Kuala Lumpur, or KL as the natives call it. We were flying to the island of Langkawi on the Northwest coast of Malaysia. Rangerette and I retired, after two New Year parties within 5 weeks. We were ready to move on and start the Year of the Tiger.