When Two Sanguines Got Connected II: Interesting Encounter and Seating

Before Ray came to Melaka, he had already mentioned the local speciality chicken rice balls. So it did not take me a long time to plan where to bring him for lunch. As tourists, our place of interest was of course the famous Jonker Street. While driving, I told him about the story of my two parking spaces in front of Dataran Pahlawan on the day I helped with the voters registration. Again, we easily got an empty slot after prayer. Hallelujah!

At first, we stopped at Hoe Kee chicken rice ball restaurant where I had last eaten with my family members two years ago. There was a long queue outside. I remembered my brother Seng preferred Chung Wah. So we walked further up and joined the smaller waiting crowd outside the dowdy kopitiam-like restaurant.

In less than ten minutes, we were assigned to a table to share with another customer who was alone. Very soon, my sanguine senior engaged the diner in conversation by asking her in Mandarin where she was from. As soon as I heard the pretty lady's accent, I knew she came from China. She had seized a ticket during AirAsia promotions to travel to Malaysia last weekend. As she would stay only two days, she had decided to choose Melaka as her only city of destination. Her reason was simple and related to the history--because Cheng Ho had been to Melaka many times!

Unlike other restaurants, Chung Wah sells exclusively one type of dish. Both Ray and I had tasted their food in the past. The rice balls were still delicious but to our disappointment, the chicken that day was overcooked and soggy. Nevertheless, we were very glad to meet an independent traveller like Wang Yi.

I could have included her in my "tour guiding" programme but we had to leave the Jonker Street immediately after the meal. When we were back again, it was time to look for the second must-eat in our list--cendol at Jonker 88. The restaurant long in size was so fully occupied that we were not able to find two available seats at any tables after we had paid and were holding the two bowls of shaved ice. Thank God Ray noticed a corner where we could place two plastic stools and finally settled down.

The cold dessert refreshed us under the hot weather. And instead of antique household items displayed everywhere in the restaurant, we had a special view of banknotes of ancient times from different countries.

Now we were going to do visit a place that typical tourists would not think of. Guess where was it...