all who wander: Malaka & KL Photos

Here are photos from Malaka & KL. Enjoy!

Also, I just relistened to part of yesterday's post. Ugh. Kudos to anyone who can come up with a cool replacement phrase for "It was really interesting!" or prevent my annoying sentence fillers. Oh well.

This restaurant's version of vegetarian food was chopped potatoes and ketchup, haha. The fish was really good though.

Most questionable dish of the night by far.

Cendol! [Chin-dull] A dessert with cocnut milk, shaved ice, green jelly things, and red beans to name a few. Tastes like Christmas.

Sight where Malaysia gained their independence from Britain in the 50's, now commemorated with a McDonald's.

'A Famosa.'

Dutch graveyard.

One in every crowd.

Gravestones.

The statue of Francis Xavier outside of St. Paul Church in Malaka. Actually, there's a pretty cool story behind it. He was a missionary and once he died, his body was sent to Malaka. After a year, it was decided the body needed to be moved for whatever reason. It didn’t show much decay which eventually led to the decision to make him a saint. When the Catholic church decided to sever his arm as a relic and it still dripped blood. Pretty cool I guess. But once the night after this particular statue was built, a tree is said to have fallen on it and snap the arm off. So now this miraculous statue stands and poses with all sorts of ridiculous tourists all day. The end.

The exterior of the church.

Around Malaka.

A tomb found in the middle of Malaka. Dr. Emmanuel said there were a lot of myths revolving around this tomb, but the most popular one began by saying that a warrior once was rumored to have had an affair with one of the Sultan's girls. The Sultan, of course, wasn't too happy about this and sent the best friend of the 'criminal' to execute him (they all had names of course, and of course I can't remember them). The friend refused and this pissed the Sultan off even more, so he ordered the criminal to kill the friend, which he did because the criminal said that his loyalty to his king came before all other things. The message was supposed to be how strong of ties one should have to their ruler, but all I got was 'nice guys finish last.'

Notice how narrow the shop entrances are? The buildings actually extended really far back. Prof Emmanuel told us that this was because the Dutch taxed based on how wide a building was for some reason.

'Lotus shoes.' This is near the street historically known as Jonker Street, basically Chinatown.

At the popular religon temple. I quite enjoyed this fellows multi-tasking.

Shop across the street that built cars, houses, cardboard prada/gucci bads, phones, practically anything you would ever want. It's Chinese tradition to burn these things so they will go to one's ancestors.

Mosque down the street.

Okay, off to K.L. now:

Indian food night number 1! Mine was called something like "Egg Brusali" and was extremely spicy/delicious.

Petronas Towers: the only way we ever managed to find our hotel.

We spent about 2 hours in this shop trying on tacky dresses. It sold ridiculous outfits that we could never afford, not even with Ringget.

So close, but so far.

Women in Malaysia...

I thought the sunglasses were necessary for this picture. Also, I don't know that Malaysia has anything to do with space exploration, but okay.

National momument created to commemorate soilders who died during WWII. Yes, it was modeled after the Iwo Jima memorial.

The indentions in the knife are from where young Malay men would press down onto the knife with each of their fingers while the metal was still glowing with heat, sort of as a rite of passage. Sounds like some boys I know.

Traditional Malay spirit masks that are used to appease the gods and convince them to restore things to their natural order. This one was used by husbands to get their wives to return to the kitchen. Wouldn't it just be easier to do it themselves?