Kristen & Clare Travelling: Malaysia - Melaka

After an awful bus ride from Cherating we arrived in Melaka - an awesome historic city. The best thing we found of course was the variety of good food! We sampled all sorts of local cuisine and took photos of all of the meals and so we present to you 'The Food Files':

First and foremost is the favourite Laksa from a restaurant in China town called Nancy's Kitchen.

Then a close second comes 'top hats' which is a Melaka specialty and are a taste sensation! They are shaped like a top hat, hence the name and are filled with jicama, shrimps, egg, chilli, corriander and fried onion.

Can't remember what this little number was called but there are many versions of it available. It's was tastier than what it looks!

Then comes the famous Malaysian dish Nasi Lemak which is delicious. It's rice with a spicy sauce filled with anchovies and peanuts.

Satay is big in Melaka and we lined up at a very popular satay restaurant for half an hour to trial the food. This place in unique in that you cook the food yourself. You choose as much or as little as you want from this fridge full of skewered goodies like seafood, veggies, meats, wantans and other little packages.

This is our selection which turned out to be way too much for two! As usual our eyes are bigger than our bellies!

Then you stick it all in the cooker which is filled with the satay sauce until cooked and then scoff! We have a photo of us scoffing but it's quite unpleasant so we'll just leave that one out...

It's funny because there's a huge gas bottle at every table. This was taken from the front of the line out the front.

This was a weird one. It was really tasty and we ordered it by pointing at a random spot on a menu. It was basically really salty eggplant in a yummy sauce.

This is the renouned Portugese 'devil curry' and accompanied the eggplant dish above.

Now we come to drinks and desserts:

Another weird one - we saw people ordering it and so said "I'll have what she's having" and put in our order.
It was meant to be a dessert which was weird because the sauce was savoury made from soy or something. It basically consisted of cucumber, apple, pinapple, orange and other fruits mixed in this sauce and covered with peanuts! We didn't manage to polish this one off...

Ahhh Ais Kacang! We ordered this one wherever possible as it was so good. It's made up of coconut milk, sugar cane syrup and ice and comes with a whole heap of strange surprises like green jelly balls, corn and beans! They give you a spoon and an extra wide straw. It's a strange (yet rewarding) sensation sucking solid things through a straw.

This was a heavenly dessert made from much the same as the drink above.
Really good on a hot day...

Apart from eating we went to a circus, visited a martime museum and another museum with an exhibition called 'Enduring Beauty' where the pictures and other exhibits reveal the differing concepts of 'beauty' as practised by different cultures. Among the different concepts of beauty exhibited are skin tattooing, stretching lips by the insertion of round discs, moulding heads into oval shapes and restricting the growth of feet. Pretty interesting stuff!