Malacca is the 3rd smallest state in Malaysia. It has a population of about 800 000 people. Out of this, 10% are Indians, 30% are Chinese, 50% are Malay and the rest are Eurasians. ‘Eurasians’ started from 1511-1641 when the Portuguese came. The Dutch then took over until 1775 when the British came. The Japanese came and took over in 1941, and later though, in 1947, the British took over for good.
Names like ‘Ferrera’, ‘Gomez’etc., are for people of Portuguese descendants who are, by default, Catholics. On the other hand, those with surnames unpronounceable, are usually of Dutch descendant. They are, by default, born Protestants. All these people of Portuguese and Dutch descendant tend to look dark and a lot like Malays.
Malacca town also has a rather rural environment. The roads are wide and the buildings of the places we visited were more or less grimy and dilapidated. There was a lot of spacious ground though, and most of the buildings we saw, if not all, were low in height. There was not a single building the height of our Singaporean HDB flats. A reason as to why there were less, if not no high-rise buildings/residential buildings, is probably because Malacca, being big in comparison to Singapore, there is more land for people to own their own property/houses and thus, a lesser/no need for a single building to have to house numerous people, resulting in a lesser need for high-rise buildings. There were also quite a number of roads and alleys with two point perspectives, not just one. There were diversions and such.
The adverts in the town were about food/beverages, road/street directories and shops names. In parts of the town where we visited, there were trishaws as a form of transport for mostly tourists. There were also a lot of motorcyclists and cars along the roads in Malacca. This is probably because Malacca is quite huge and it is hard to get to places fast on foot, therefore, explaining the sometimes, regular flowing, heaps of traffic.
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