Melaka

UiTM organized a 3-day trip to Melaka for us. The person in charge from the faculty of architecture Mrs. Zarina wanted to show us the oldest city in Malaysia so it was a trip about history and culture.

Our hostel in Melaka was located along the river in Chinatown. It had a very nice flair, was very clean, really cheap and the owner was extremely friendly and cooperative.

On our first day we went with some local students of UiTM to a living museum, one of the oldest houses in Melaka called Villa Sentosa. The owner still lives in this house and keeps everything displayed interesting.

 We are even allowed to hit the over thousand year old “Gong” and of course we took the opportunity to write some German greetings in the guestbook.

 Later that day our new friend Faiz took over as a tour guide and showed us around the city.

 He also introduced us to the traditional Malaysian cuisine, Laksa as a main dish and Baba Cendol for dessert. Laksa is a spicy noodle soup with seafood, egg and an omelet in it. Cendol is made of shaved ice, glazed with caramel sauce and mixed with beans and corn. Crazy, but delicious!

On the next day Mrs. Zarina took us on a museum tour in the morning. It was very interesting to learn something about the culture and history of Malaysia and especially about Melaka. As mentioned before, Melaka is the oldest city in Malaysia and has influences of the Dutch, Portuguese and Britons.

In the afternoon we went to “Jonker” street were a lot of different shops and restaurants are located. We enjoyed walking and grubbing trough the souvenir stores.

Furthermore we went to a mosque and watched locals performing their traditional washing rituals and their prayers. We were pretty fascinated as it is a totally different religious act. It was our first time getting this close to experiencing the Islam religion.

 Melaka is famous for its mixture of cultures and religions. Hence, our next stop was a Chinese temple. That is a totally different world. The temple is very colorful and magnificent.

To complete this fantastic day we drove to the Portuguese district which is famous for delicious seafood. And it tasted fabulous!

 On the last day of our stay in Melaka we had some free time before we had to leave so we decided to have some Indian style breakfast, Roti Canai, some kind of a thin fried pancake with curry sauce to dip the crepes in. For drink we chose the traditional Malaysian Tea Tarik, a black tea with milk and sugar. After that we did a little bit of shopping, mainly for souvenirs.

On our journey home with the UiTM bus we took the time to get to know better our Malaysian friends and tried to learn important words and phrases of the Malayan language. In exchange we taught them some German words and sentences, too. To increase the atmosphere we tried to learn a Malaysian tongue twister and some of us did pretty well:

“Ku ketip kuku kahki kakak ku”

You have to find out by yourself what that actually means but as you may know tongue twisters do not make much sense very often.

Thaipusam

Thaipusam is a Hindu festival celebrated by the Tamil community on the full moon in the Tamil month of Thai (January/February). The word Thaipusam is derived from the month name Thai and Pusam, which refers to a star that is at its highest point during the festival.

The festival commemorates the occasion when Parvati gave Murugan, son of Shiva and Parvati, got a vel (spear) so he could vanquish the evil demon Soorapadman.

We heard a lot about the Thaipusam festival and a lot of locals, friends and others recommended us to visit Batu Caves during Thaipusam. The day of the Thaipusam were closer and we were very excited and nervous about what we would actually encounter based on what we heard from everyone around us.

 We arrived at the festival in the morning and all of our suggestions were exceed in a way nobody of us could expect. We walked through an enormous crowd of Indian people which all participate at the festival. We saw children running around, babies on the shoulders of their parents, old people with a weary walk through the crowd and all wear traditional clothes and decorative origin jewelry.

We were marveled at the amount of people and didn’t realize that we are standing in one of the festive procession. There were more than one million visitors every year and we were part of this festival and we couldn’t believe the bizarre things that happened in front of us.  We were almost speechless the whole time and just watched all the human proceedings which happened within our reach.

The purpose the pilgrims visited the Batu Caves was because of the holy shrine located inside the cave. All the pilgrims were in a kind of Trans and it seemed to us that they were not able to recognize what happened around them. Their only goal was to climb up the stairs to the Caves while conducting their rituals, accompanied with chants.

All of the events that happened in front of us were foreign and strange to us but at the same time interesting and very impressive and emotional. We stood among the crowd and try to comprehend what people can do due to faith. People had hooks in their back, spears through their mouth and many more strange doings…..

At each point of time during our visit to the festival, everyone had a happy and friendly impression despite all the painful rituals. We had never witnessed such faith and custom where people wore bright colored costumes with flowers and offerings pierced on their bodies. Sometimes, pictures say more than a thousand words….

This eventful day with all the impressions was such an amazing experience for us and we were deeply impressed by all the things we saw the whole day. This spectacular event is something we will talk about our whole life. It was one of the days we felt that we were so close yet far from understanding another culture, religion and world.

At the end of the day, we had trouble returning home to our apartment because of the overloaded local transportation due to the crowd.