My Malaysian experience falls squarely between The Best Country I’ve Ever Been To and The Worst Country I’ve Ever Been To. A perfect five if you will. While there were certainly plenty of great things about this country and plenty of not-so-great, nothing really stands out one way or the other. It’s a schizophrenic culture of equal parts Malay, Chinese, and Indian that don’t really meld into any single identity.

As I mentioned previously though, if you like big buildings this is a good place for you. Even though there’s really only the two twin towers and one large communications tower to marvel at. The rest, again, fall right smack dab into thirty-story mediocrity. It was great to be reminded of what a mall is like, and it was nice to know we had the option of going to Chile’s if we wanted to. Not that we ever ever would of course.

Malacca (or Melaka or Malaka – there’s a zillion ways to spell it apparently) was a pleasant surprise. We didn’t have the bar set all that high, but the Dutch influence was neat-o and it was obvious they spent a good deal of effort maintaining the original facades. A very walkable town, although as you can see in the video I decided to try my hand at driving a Trishaw. Much to the amusement of Joy and the normal driver. There was a nice night market (although we’re starting to find these all too common) but what set this one apart was stumbling on a room of Malay Line Dancing. Yeah, you heard that right.

There is also an old Portuguese Settlement in the southern outskirts of the city. We decided to trishaw it over there, but our first guy was too old to make it the distance. So he pawned us off onto another guy who just barely made it. We nicknamed him El Gordo as at first we thought the locals were laughing at us for riding in one of these stupid things. Then we realized they were actually laughing at how fat our driver was. But it was all worth it because we had the best crab of our lives caught right off the shore we were eating on.