malacca - waiting

wake up this morning to the waiting for the toilet that his galfren is using. life is a waiting....

waiting for what?

waiting to be your own boss, waiting to control your your life.... waiting to write a book, waiting to invent something, waiting to discover a new theory..... waiting to be acknowledged in the public.... waiting to attain spiritual enlightenment..... waiting to be the number 1 in watever....

marathon man is waiting for the sun to shine and cast its rays onto the wall of his house thru the small rectangular window of his bathroom..... he likes to see the golden patch on the wall, it moves amid very slowly.... if you can wait, you would be able to see the patch descending lower and lower.

but marathon man cannott wait to do his running... after he spent 2 days in the world heritage place - malacca.

after putting on the right attire, he darts from into the street in no time... the wind gushes at him when the traffic passes him by.....

for many years he had not visited malacca. he was looking for the row of hawkers near the seaside, and the smallest round-about at the end of the road infront of the hawker centre. he could not find them. had they already been demolished and replaced with somethying else. it was during the nite when he hanged around the city, so he could not be sure where he actually was. they could be still there, somewhere else.

he headed to the portugese settlement, after hearing some of it from the tv programs, that the food there was one of a kind, that the place still retained its past disposition and aura. but what a dispointment when he arrived at a concrete hawker centre after following the map and the road signs that clearly stated where the portugese settlement was. there was a lot of touting from different stalls. he settled at stall number 10. he ordered fried(dry) crab, ikan bakar, and kangkong - all supposed to be prepared in portugese way, but marathon man would not know as the dishes were more or less the same as what he had eaten in normal restaurants... and he could not tell what the portugese way of cooking was like.

malacca like some malaysian cities, is a one-way-street town. you have to know the exact routes and directions if you want to get from point a to b. looking at the map will not bring you there, because, it does not show the traffic directions.

the next day, he went around downtown along the river. from jonker street, to get to the red-house(that's what the locals call the area around a'formosa, studhuys, st paul's hill)..... it took him 15 minutes to realise that it'd be better to park on the bank opposite the red-house, than to cross the malacca river to park near the red-house. he just had to walk across the bridge after parking.

in jonker's walk, there was this lady chinese caligrapher doing her stuff with people surrounding her. she wrote elegant chinese with the chinese brush. but she had no right hand, her left arm was totally missing. she tied the brush to the end of her right arm, but boy, every stroke of her brush on the paper was so delicate and accurate, it exuded the poise of a dancer from the tang dynasty.

the tourist sites in red house still the same as many years ago when he was there. but what the st paul's hill overlooked was a different scene, with many new houses on the left side and the city was no longer the same one many years ago.

he went around the city, stopped by some street to check out the durians. he noticed though it's still in season, not many fruit stalls selling the king of the fruits, even along the way when he detoured into muar from the north-south hi-way.

he asked the durian uncle, "why not much durians this time?"

"oh.... all go to singapore."

his durian addiction kicked in, so he bought and ate a couple on the spot.... not the best, but can-do lah!

he had his lunch in the ole sayang peranakan restaurant. very crowded and noisy with a bunch of youngsters blabberring and laughing-out-loud as if they owned the restaurant. the food - quite good, as he was already very hungry, but the sambal balachan was super SALTISH.

he left malacca after lunch, and had his dinner in jb, the bamboo house, famous for its oven-baked herbal chicken - the price was 14rm, a raise of 1rm when he was here a few months ago, and no more ta-pau.

he rolled into singpore check-point when the lights were all up. little did he realize that the moon had become round again. the trip to the ancient malay sultanate will bring another waiting period before he would be back again.