Melaka.

To get to Melaka from Singapore, take the Singapore-Melaka Express from the Lavender-Kallang-Bahru junction, which is a ten-minute walk from the Lavender MRT station. It is a four-and-a-half hour-long bus ride across the Singapore-Malaysian border for sixteen Sing dollars.

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Melaka was once considered one of the most powerful trading posts of Southeast Asia due to its strategic midway location between India and China. Over the centuries, it has switched hands among Chinese-Muslim princes, Islamic sultans, Portuguese missionaries, Dutch settlers and at the very end of the nineteenth century, fell into the general sweep of British colonization until Malaysia became its own independent entity in 1946.

This dazzling mosaic of past power struggle is evident in the sensory overload you experience upon arriving at the town square. A huge brick red church with an accompanying clock tower is the most obvious allusion to former Portuguese rule. Surrounded by bright periwinkle buildings adorned in tiny Christmas lights, you would almost think that you were in Mexico if it weren’t for the Sari shops and the smell of chicken satay just down the street.

Walk maybe fifty feet down the road and across the river, and you’re smack in the middle of Chinatown, where clustered amongst private art galleries and antique shops, you can see Chinese people of all ages practicing dance moves in a tiny community hall. At night, if you are a girl wearing short shorts, you will most likely get hit on by a drunk Portuguese street musician named Max and a Chinese barfly whose name I don’t remember, both of them old enough to be yo’ daddy. (This Chinese barfly in question, by the way, claims to have several international girlfriends, including a 23-year-old Finland native and a middle-aged German woman with a husband.)

Unlike the sleek urban center of Kuala Lumpur where you can buy a Gucci purse and a Coffee Bean cappuccino, Melaka is a more quirky and colorful neighborhood, the city equivalent of the crazy aunt who wears too much gaudy jewelry and too much perfume, but always has great stories to share.

This is not to say that Melaka is a pristine time capsule completely unscathed by the march of modernization. If you wander a little astray from the heart of the old historic district, you can go get some burgers and fries at their local McDonalds. At this point, the cynic in me cries, “God bless globalization!”

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So far, I’ve been ridiculously lucky with all my travel accommodations outside of Singapore, and going to Melaka was no exception.

Thanks to the omnipotent power of Lonely Planet, I found the Sama-Sama Guesthouse, which is a 300-year-old Dutch house that has a huge painting of Bob Marley’s face on the wall of its lobby and is decorated with all sorts of weird knick-knacks everywhere. Don’t be surprised to see a Spiderman mask nailed onto the doorway, or a weird seashell-and-Rubik’s-Cube wind chime apparatus hanging from the second-floor of the courtyard.

I freaking love this hostel. It’s a cluttered, clunky little place bursting with greenery and old-town charm. The hostess of this guesthouse is a sweet, bespectacled woman from Switzerland who also likes to keep a bunch of cats, dogs and fish. Even the bathroom has a makeshift fishbowl made out of an empty Pepsi bottle containing a single beta fish.

Right outside your doorstep on the second floor, you can sleep and read in quite possibly the most comfortable red hammock in the world.

At night, they decorate the tiny courtyard and koi pond with candles.

Just one street over, you can go visit the night market and buy a lot of cheap, useless things. If you are bored with that, then you can eat deep-fried ice cream, among many other goodies.

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I bought a shitload of shit in Melaka, and I think I’m going to need at least a week to recover from this materialistic binging. The fact that shameless haggling is a socially acceptable phenomenon does not help much for my banking account, either.

Among clunky necklaces, cute tops, postcards of Chinese pin-up girls and other cheap junk, I also bought this:

Yes, it is strange that it would be in a night market in Melaka, out of all places, where I would come across an old Time magazine featuring an article on Tristar’s horrible remake of Godzilla. Or maybe it isn’t so strange after all. It was inevitable. For reasons that some of you understand, I had to buy it and it is right beside me now on my desk in Singapore.

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P.S. Caroline, I got your letter yesterday. Thank you for thinking of me while you were at work, you have no idea how much it brightened my day to see your scratch-paper letter. Much, much love, my dear! I will write you an e-mail soon.