Simply cycling around
Today, Stephane proposed to have another go in the city around 5pm until dinner time to take some more pictures. Kasia, Juliano and myself followed. First, we came back to the flashy painted wall, then walked along the river until we found a place where to eat. Finally we came back towards the centre and found some nice street arts.
Another project that I chose to start myself: redoing the wooden floor of the rooftop room. The guys who done that before set up the floor the wrong way. They did not cross the piece between each other. I’ve found a circular saw in a dark corner somewhere in the backpacker. It’s just what I need to modify the geometry of the slats. Let’s start!
Since more than a week now, Shen show me a very nice place where local students come everyday for lunch. We call it between each other the market but it’s actually street food centre. Every weekdays, hundreds of students come here to eat their lunch. A meal is about 3 to 5 ringgit (~$1AUD to $1.5AUD) which is nothing. They don’t give much food though except one shop where we go everyday now. There is a various amount of choice. The woman give us first some rice and then it’s self service :-) I mainly eat veggies with a bit of meat or eggs. First time I’ve been taking a large amount of rice and veggies for 3 ringgit! ($1AUD > 0.6€). Then I don’t know what happened but as more as we came, as more expensive the price became. The is the Malaysian way maybe : More you come, more you pay haha.
Howard realised quickly that I like to help and now he comes to me with other ideas :-) I don’t mind. It’s even good because I can have a break working on my future version of my blog and get out of the screen for few hours per day. Howard asked me to build a rain protection on the left side (which is transparent). I’ve done this one and took some time to fixed the sun protection on the front. Easy project :-)
Tonight, we have been eating at the Sikh temple called “Gurdwara Sahib Melaka” and enjoyed the experience of free food. The is part of the Sikh religion to offer food to people who need. Well, we don’t really need but we wanted to try at least one time. Since we arrived at Ringo’s Foyer, we have heard about this place. Several people told us : “This is fine, you can go there and eat”. The food is vegetarian. They give us as much rice as we want plus some different sauce mixed with veggies. The offered us as well some flashy green jelly stuff, a sweet soup, “crackers” and water. Our plates was more than full and delicious food. Actually this is the best food I’ve ever eat in Melaka :-)
When I was at the Thai temple in Singapore we had to wash our plates. Here it’s the same but they have a quite clever way to do it. There is 5 big sinks in a row. The first one has a tap to clean roughly the dishes before dipping them in the second sink. The second sink has dishwasher soap mixed in the water to clean properly the dishes. The last 3 sinks have only clear water in them. We dip the dishes from the second sink until the last one to rinse. That way, they don’t use much water compared to the amount of people who can eat. That’s clever!
This is what has done Arjan when we were in Singapore. He has a done a great job! Using thicker thread make the tyre much stronger naturally. The one I’ve used (the grey one we can see underneath) did work for a little while but was going to collapse soon. I’ve been able to cycle until Melaka but I had another problem though. The thread being thicker, the protection I put inside the tyre was not strong enough so I had three punctures along the way between SIngapore and Melaka. The following images will explain better that my poor english ;-)
Howard (the guy with the glasses) is the owner of the Ringo’s Foyer in Melaka (which is invite cyclist for free). He used to cycle himself and today he welcomes any cyclist who comes around. He started a collection of souvenir pictures that he puts on the wall behind us. The two guys on the right (They are actually 3 people) are coming from Latvia and have been cycling all the way down to Malaysia. They got their bike stolen in Poland only a month or two after they started. They had to work somewhere there to buy new bicycles. That was bad luck! They want to cycle until New Zealand and find a job there. After that, they think about splitting and continuing the adventure by themselves.