Day 187 – 04 February 2010: The culinary capital of Malaysia

I am with hangover again. We have a late morning departure to Melaka, and the friendly Classic Inn hostel staff invite us to leave messages in marker pens on the wall, and they gather to see us off as we get onto the truck.

At Melaka, I go straight to the hospital to have my ears looked at again, taking Jen with me for company. Here, I find the kind of hospital which could only have been a private one in the UK. I am sent straight to an ear specialist doctor’s office, and I have to wait behind only for one other patient. In the UK, getting your ears cleaned out involves a painful process of warm water being pressed via a large syringe into your eardrum to flush the wax out. Here, they have a little electric ear hoover, which gently sucks it out. This has always struck me as the way it should be done.

Nearly all the doctors in the hospital are UK trained according to the medical centre brochure in the waiting room. The doctor I am seeing qualified at the University of Edinburgh. I think most doctors who work in the NHS would be quite envious of those working in this hospital, a fairly recent construction with individual doctor’s offices and the newest technology.

As a token of gratitude for accompanying me, I take Jen to lunch. Melaka is supposed to be the culinary capital of Malaysia. We go to Pizza Hut. ‘I’m quite proud of that’, says Jen.

To be fair, we did pass an outdoor food hall / market, but it’s unpopulated and looks closed. Melaka has a lot of new buildings, such as hotels and shopping malls, and much of the more traditional architecture look like replicas. With its culinary reputation and its history as a major port, there has obviously been a lot of growth here based on tourism, but the streets are largely empty. It must be low season.

Afterward lunch, full of Pizza, I am sleepy and stay in my room for the rest of the day and evening. American Brian, who I have been rooming with since Laurie’s boyfriend joined the trip in Vietnam, is thankfully otherwise occupied, so I am left undisturbed.