Day 33: Melaka & Day 34:KL Day

Day 33: Today I went to Melaka on a group tour. Melaka formerly known as Malacca has a very colorful history. Melaka was where Islam was first introduced to Malaysia. It was part of the Dutch East Indian company. It was ruled by the Melaka Sultan, Portugese, Dutch, Japanese, and the British. There were alot of religious buildings that represented the different cultures that were in Melaka, we saw a Portuguese church, Chinese temple, and a Hindu temple. We saw the 'Strait's of Malacca', which seperate Malaysia from Indonesia.

Day 34: For breakfast I had Roti Canai, basically Roti with Chicken curry, then I headed off finishing up the rest of sightseeing in KL. I started the day off at Masjid Jamek, it's the cities oldest surviving mosque. Then headed to 'Little India', and then to a couple of other famous architectures. I then headed to a Malaysian Cultural Dance show, the show was only $1.5. It was really good, lively with colorful dancing and costumes, they had dances from some of the different states in Malaysia as well as an Indian and Chinese dance. Then I headed off to KL Tower, it is the 4th largest communications tower and saw great views of KL and it's wonderful architecture.

I then headed to the Petronas Towers to meet up with Jane and Charmaine (the Malaysian Chinese mother and daughter, I had met during my Beijing trip). They took me out for a dinner for Baba Nonyan (mix of Malaysian and Chinese) food. Charmaine came well dressed in the occassion as she had on a Chinese top and a Malaysian skirt. The meal was faboulous. We had an appetizer and a couple of traditonal Baba Nonyan dishes, one which Charmaine told me literally translated into fish stomach, it was a green dish and it was very good. The Baba Nonyan dishes had a more of a soury taste compared to the other traditional Malaysian dishes. We finished off dinner with Ice Kacchan, my favorite!!!!

Then we headed back to Petronas Tower as that is where Charmaine's car was. When we got there were litterally hundreds of people on all levels of the Petrona's Tower. Wondering what the crowd was there for, we asked around and found out that 'Bollywood Film Awards' were being held that night and famous people like Amita Bachan, Ashriya Rey, Sharuk Khan, etc... (famous Indian Bollywood stars), were there. We did see people going on the elevators from the 1st floor to the 5th floor with security guards as they got off on the 5th floor the crowd went wild, unfortuantely I wasn't able to make out the figures getting off the elevators. Jane and Charmaine were well familiar with these Bollywood stars, as they had watched Bollywood films...