December 10, 2002 Malacca, Malaysia
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I'm here for culture, so I went all-out on museums. I went to the Malaysian Independence Memorial, the Democracy Museum, the Sultan's Palace, and the Maritime Museum, as well as walking up St. John's Hill to look at the ruins of the old chapel. The museums where old and musty and didn't contain too many artifacts, mostly panels of text. The Sultan's Palace had displays on the traders who used to come here, with mannequins wearing their traditional clothes. However they only had a couple types of mannequin, so all the Chinese traders were clones, as where the Indian traders, etc. The Maritime Museum was especially bad. It was a replica of a Dutch ship, and inside was a sauna filled with more mannequins. There was another building with displays of random equipment with no theme or explanation.
That night I went to an Indian restaurant and found where all the tourists go. The food was mediocre, the portions were small, and the price was exorbitant: RM17, about US$4.50. Belive me, that's expensive here. I have to get up the nerve to order food from the street vendor the locals eat at.