Melaka, Malaysia or: Heckasac does mukbang

My last post has gotten over 900 hits, thanks to Bill Burg posting it on Reddit. How cool to feel like this ol' blog has some life in 'er yet. Plus that put a nice end on the mildly painful saga of writing a piece and having it get killed.

I just returned from a two week solo trip to Singapore and Malaysia, and if you follow me on Insta, you know I posted pretty frequently. I do that more when I'm by myself so I don't get lonely and I feel like I'm communicating with friends while I'm traveling. I enjoyed seeing everyone's Halloween costumes, although it was cool to be in a country that was way more stoked on Diwali than Halloween. (Shout out in Sac to the Majka chef being Carmie, he really looks like him)

Rather than do an epic post on a two week trip, I thought I'd capture one night in the city of Melaka, south of Kuala Lumpur (once you've been to Malaysia it's fun to call it KL instead of Kuala Lumpur, everyone calls it KL). Melaka is one of the older cities in Malaysia, and was occupied by the Portuguese in the 1500s, and then the Dutch, starting in the 1600s. Then for a bit it was occupied by the British, and finally the Japanese from 1942-1945, which sounds like a chaotic 3 years in which the Japanese canceled school and then made the teachers learn Japanese and teach in Japanese. Then it was British again for a while and then in the 60s when modern Malaysia was formed it was Malaysia. I'm not great at history so I'm sure some of this is wrong.

Which is all to say it has many folks there who descended from Portuguese and Dutch, and I found out while reading about stuff to do that there was an area on the bay/coast that's called the Portuguese settlement and has seafood restaurants. That sounded like a nice sunset/nighttime activity. I saw it was about 35 minute walk from where I was staying. Most of the trip was very hot and humid, where I would be soaked in sweat over and over again throughout the day, and then rest and cool off in air conditioned places. I smelled and looked great, needless to say! But, around sunset, that length walk seemed doable although have no doubt, constantly bathed in sweat, never ceasing. Also, the area I was staying in was so tourist-choked, that catching a Lyft there (it's called Grab in a lot of Asia), would take so long, and driving once the car arrived would take so long that walking would take an equal amount of time even though it was only a couple of kilometers.

So, a walk! The walk took me out of the tourist area for the first time in my stay in Melaka, which although not as picturesque, was also not as tourist-choked and I got to see some non-tourist restaurants and areas. I was about 20 minutes into the walk when I came to a 6 lane road that I had to cross. I guess to call it a freeway would be dramatic but it felt more like a freeway than not a freeway and I did not want to cross it even though I was now within 15 minutes of my destination. Then I had a frustrating 20 minutes while I waited for a Grab, while I watched hotel guests staying in the big hotel across the freeway, leisurely cross the freeway, pausing in the middle for the other direction of traffic. Coulda crossed oh well.

So I get in the Grab and then in about 10 minutes we get to the Portuguese settlement. Wiki tells me that in 1933, some land was purchased for the Kristang people, which are the mixed Portuguese/Malaysian folks. They have a couple of festas in June, and a few buildings, and then a bunch of seafood restaurants.

When you roll up first thing you see is this Christ the Redeemer statue. 

I had to choose a spot to eat so I randomly picked one that looked crowded, I think I was in De Costa's, but the boundary between places felt fluid (while it probably totally is not)

This was a def big group dining spot. So as usual, I was the weirdo dining alone but no one cared and they were very helpful when I ordered

It was crowded and fast-paced. It was a Friday night and everyone was getting tons of dishes on big lazy susans. The ordering looked family style so I knew if I ordered more than one dish it would be too much food but ya gotta try more than one thing. I hadn't had crab on my trip so I decided on chili crab, sweet potato leaves and then the server asked about what I think he said was "pan" like bread and did I want three pieces I said ok not knowing what was up. Nothing on the menu sounded particularly Portuguese except you could get what they termed Portuguese baked crab or squid or fish. That sounded boring so chili crab it was.

The food took a while so I just people-watched and drank beer and then the sweet potato greens came first and I was really hungry and they tasted really good. 

Then came these little breads which were so hot, I think from being grill toasted and they were so yeasty and sweet I could have def eaten more of those. There are no other restaurants outside of the Portuguese settlement that I saw with this type of bread so this may be a Portuguese influence thing although I'm definitely no expert. 

Then came the chili crab and I was so wowed by the size and nervous about how I was going to eat it that I didn't even get a damn centered picture. Steamed crab can really retain the heat for a long time, so I kept trying to eat it while the shell was still burning hot. I love to eat crab, but I don't love to get messy so this was like a nightmare of being the only lone diner plunging my entire hands into this saucy saucy dish, and also fully dropping my crab cracker in the sauce and then trying to use it and having it be too slippery. Oh also, still sweating like a pig and they barely have napkins in Malaysia, sometimes not at all, but here, they had a box of tiny thin Kleenexes on the wall that I could reach. The sauce was on my face, it was running down my arms to my elbows (did not get it on my dress!) I really felt like I was doing a middle-aged white lady mukbang, which none of these poor patrons had asked for. There was a table of teenagers near me, innocently toasting pitchers of watermelon juice and my nightmare is someone would film me and I would go viral. About halfway through a server was like, oh we have gloves and I said too late! I'm all in. Since it's crab there isn't actually as much meat as you think, there was no body meat, just legs and claws, so it was not the insane amount of food I thought at first. It was all 98 ringgit, including beer, so that's about 25 bucks, which is expensive for Malaysia.

Before I ate I took some pictures of the shoreline, pretty dystopian, with like, this semi-crumbling and almost aquatic apartment houses against the sunset.

Before I ate I had a beer at this tiny bar at the end of a pier. It was a unique setting to have  a brew

 Glad to be home and I hope you liked this trip slice!