{"id":18225,"date":"2012-12-24T07:19:45","date_gmt":"2012-12-23T23:19:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=18225"},"modified":"2018-07-17T13:23:14","modified_gmt":"2018-07-17T05:23:14","slug":"melaka-retrospection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2012\/12\/24\/melaka-retrospection\/","title":{"rendered":"Melaka 2012 – Retrospection"},"content":{"rendered":"

If our trips to Melaka<\/a> and Sugi island<\/a> has shown us any one thing, it\u2019s that our 3.5 year old girl is ready for further trips outfield. She survived the 4 hour bus journey to\/fro Singapore and Melaka very well and quite fuss-free, took to whatever we fed her \u2013 even Indian food \u2013 and generally listened to Mommy and Daddy\u2019s instructions. No tantrums, no standoffs etc. Maybe it\u2019s just that we have got a relatively compliant daughter to begin with, so here\u2019s to hoping that our second child will be the same.:)<\/p>\n

Our stay at The Majestic was near perfect. Housekeeping was brisk and so prompt in fact that we had to on several occasions turn housekeeping away. Comparatively speaking, I don\u2019t think the staff service at this hotel has been the warmest I\u2019ve observed \u2013 that accolade still goes to Telunas Beach Resort<\/a> \u2013 but The Majestic comes very<\/em> close. Staff were consistently friendly and went out of their way to please. One incident especially sticks in my mind: we were waiting for the sixth floor lift to take the lift down to the lobby. The lift door opened to show a staff member with a small push-cart of maintenance items. The lift was comfortably large enough for all of us to join in on our way down, but the staff immediately exited and vacated the lift for us and courteously kept it open and assisted us in pushing the appropriate lift buttons (not that we needed it).<\/p>\n

Every staff we encountered \u2013 the concierge, the restaurant waiters, the doormen, and even the maintenance workers contracted to do some painting work while we were there \u2013 all offered greetings at every turn. Several even engaged Hannah by chatting with her, though our girl \u2013 shy as she normally is \u2013 normally needed prompting from us to reciprocate. Likewise, we returned the courtesies whenever we received it. Hopefully it goes a bit of a way to show that not all Singaporeans are unhappy or grouchy.<\/p>\n

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Morning breakfasts at The Majestic. Hannah had some admirers, including a middle-age Caucasian couple who found her very cute!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Nasi Lemak at the hotel. Very delicious! We had these three times.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Pretty small ala carte breakfast menu though.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Our daily breakfasts at the hotel\u2019s restaurant were idyllic and quiet affairs well-attended to by staff, and yep no screaming children or Singaporeans tripping over themselves at the buffet queue. There was one minor hiccup though; the concierge staff mistakenly advised us on our third day that ala carte items didn\u2019t come with our stay package even after our repeated requests for clarification. Thankfully, that still got resolved pretty quickly by the duty manager who overhead our discussion with the concierge, and immediately stepped in to apologize on behalf of his staff, clarified, and followed-up to make sure everything was in order in the subsequent days.<\/p>\n

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Hannah lounging at our room. She watched a lot of Disney Junior TV.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Another delightful hotel perk; lots of containers containing those little tidbits we loved as children ourselves. These are little candy cookies. Hannah asked for a few of these each time we walked past the container. I think the lobby staff were kept busy topping up the container just for her.:)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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The two girls at an afternoon swim.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The hotel\u2019s pool was pretty small too; at perhaps around 10 by 3 meters. But the pool was very clean and though the hotel was fully booked during our period of stay, we had more\/less the pool to ourselves during the two occasions when Hannah swam \u2013 or paddled about rather.<\/p>\n

Apart from fine-dine breakfasts, we ate like the locals everywhere else. The cleanliness of the eateries took some getting use to, especially us as Singaporeans spoiled on normally clean eating surroundings. In fact, the less seen about the possibly less than savory preparatory conditions for some of the food we had, the better it was for me! Ling was especially bothered by the pollution. The coffee shops we ate at had no rules about patrons puffing away indoors, so on several occasions, we hurriedly had to finish eating if only to escape what seemed like Smokers Wild joints. A couple of smokers did notice that we had a young girl with us, so helpfully accommodated by moving to a further seat whenever it was possible, but others couldn\u2019t care less.<\/p>\n

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Helping herself to garlic naans at Pak Putra. She was receptive to the mutton daal too.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There\u2019s always just one question we ask ourselves to gauge whether a vacation was generally worth the expense:would we return to the place again? For this trip to Melaka, the answer would be a reluctant \u2018no\u2019 for myself, but not for any reasons to do with the cuisine or the stay at The Majestic. The food was on the overall decent and accommodation was great. It\u2019s just that there wasn\u2019t very much to do in the city itself outside eating and lounging around. There were a couple of sights worth checking out of course, but they were also quite crowded. Probably because the core area of Melaka is so compact, everyone zeroes in on the same place. There\u2019s about a day\u2019s worth of sight-seeing in the core city itself, but that seems about it.<\/p>\n

In sum, If your intent for the vacation is to just spend time with family and to just relax, a small and luxury property like The Majestic fits the bill nicely. I\u2019m already thinking of which other place to go to on our next short trip in the next 6 months; we\u2019ll probably check out Batam. A visitor\u2019s blog<\/a> has some notes about a property stay that she\u2019s frequented, and it looks intriguing.:)<\/p>\n

\"Where
Where shall we go next?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If our trips to Melaka and Sugi island has shown us any one thing, it\u2019s that our 3.5 year old girl is ready for further trips outfield. She survived the 4 hour bus journey to\/fro Singapore and Melaka very well<\/p>\n

Read More Melaka 2012 – Retrospection<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22453,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,17],"tags":[539,619],"class_list":["post-18225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-children-blues","category-traveling","tag-melaka-2012","tag-travel-retrospection","wpcat-7-id","wpcat-17-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/blog-melaka.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}