Day 3 is a fairly chill day, since we had to go to JB City Square by 5pm to settle some admin stuff, thus we had a quick lunch with some Melaka friends before making the journey back to Singapore. Day 3 itinerary: Lunch @ Hatten Hotel Travel from Melaka to Singapore Shop @ JB City Square Dinner @ JB Warakuya Lunch was at Hatten Hotel’s restaurant, Chatterz. This is the same place as where the buffet breakfast is at. Amazingly, they have buffet breakfast, semi-buffet lunch and steamboat buffet dinner. In between, they literally have to change the entire set up for the restaurant, due to the electrical appliances required for the various model. I’ll leave you with just the pictures. Overall, Hatten Hotel is a pretty nice place. I’m sure it’s quite pricey compared to most accomodations in Melaka. But as compared to city pricing such as KL, Singapore or JB, it’s fairly affordable. Views are fantastic all around, simply because Hatten Hotel is so big that it sticks out as compared to the low lying estates around in Melaka. Food is rather decent. Not exactly Melaka cuisine, but it suits the tastebuds of most people I would imagine. Melaka cuisine can be found all round though, together with other tourist memorabilia. Coming to Melaka would mostly be a family affair, given the lack of party or other sort of shopping stuff. Massages are decently cheap, and probably what most adults would go for here, after a long walk around town. After that, it was a long drive back to Singapore. We made a pitstop at JB City Square first, since we had to get some errands done. JB is still a Singaporean shopping paradise, simply because of the distance, and how prices are almost half priced compared to Singapore. I went for a Thai massage at Thai Odyssey, which is one of the more popular place in JB, and it costs RM169 (or S$70) for 2 hours. Comparatively, doing it in Singapore in...
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Day 2 of the Melaka trip would be the a large bulk of it, since day 1 is spent travelling up, and day 3 is spend travelling down. Day 2 itinerary: Hotel buffet breakfast Massage Mall roaming Bert’s Garden Wings Music Cafe Hotels nowadays tend to exclude buffet breakfast, which is largely a good thing in my opinion, since most of the time if I’m on holiday, I don’t wake up early enough for breakfast, or I would prefer to get local food off the streets. Hatten hotel provides buffet breakfast though, and since our group is quite a mix group, it’s a way to just eat together and chit chat. Which was a good thing though. The buffet spread was one of the biggest I’ve seen for breakfast! To a point it almost looked like lunch to me. There’s cheese, cold cut meat, yogurt and salads for those who eat light. There’s buns, toasts, pastries, puffs for those who needs their flour products. There’s pancakes and waffles, and there’s a porridge station for those who want a light meal. On top of that, there were numerous hot dish stations, such as a roti prata station, an entire row of spread which has nasi lemak, prawn paste chicken, fried kway teow, and many more. In my opinion, this just makes the hotel stay more worth while. We went down for breakfast at 8am, and we only left at 10.30am. Of course, I skipped lunch after that. After breakfast, it was more or less free and easy. Some of us went to do some light shopping, some of us went to chill at the hotel pool, while some of us went for massages. I was intending to get a massage right after, but I figured it might not be so good to do a massage right after a heavy meal. So I decided to just venture around the shop houses, mainly to let the food digest a bit, as well as to take some photos. One thing I’ve...
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Day 1 itinerary: Travel from Singapore to Melaka Pit stop at Pagoh Lunch @ Restoran Keng-Dom Check in to Hatten Hotel Free & Easy Dinner at Aunty Lee Jonker Street After spending the large part of the morning travelling and checking in to Hatten hotel, there was only 2.5 hours left before we headed off to dinner. Essentially I roamed around the Melaka Raya region, just taking a look at the shop houses, and the streets. As what most would imagine, it really is a sleepy town. Interestingly, there seems to be quite a few interesting restaurants. I figure I would aim to try all of them with every visit, rather than repeating restaurants. There are also numerous massage parlours around. From my understanding, most are typically clean in Melaka. The only thing is that they might upsell you other spa services. If you wanted to go for dodgy services, it seems you might have to look at other towns. Dinner was suppose to be this place called Aunty Lee. It’s apparently a famous Nonya restaurant in Melaka and we had to reserve a table and pre-order our food beforehand. However, Murphy’s Law says that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Apparently most of the food we pre-ordered was sold out. Even the curry chicken dish was left with lousy parts and there wasn’t much meat. To be fair, I will not be posting any photos and reviews on the food, but from what my friends say, the food here is suppose to be quite fantastic. I shall reserve my comments. Our next stop is to the ‘must go’ Jonker Street. Jonker Street is a pedestrian night market, where certain areas are closed to traffic and peddlers/hawkers come out to sell their goods. A good thing too, considering that I’m still hungry after dinner! One of the easiest way to get there is well, walk. Jonker Street is surrounded by hotels, and even for hotels like Hatten hotel which was at...
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Melaka is one of those nice laidback town where a lot of Singaporeans usually go for a weekend trip! Largely because of it’s cheap food, and historical sights, I suppose it’s usually parents that bring their kids along. I guess that’s more friendly than say Bangkok, Hong Kong or Macau. My family recently managed to get some 1st year anniversary tickets at Hatten Hotel, which is probably one of the newest big hotels in Melaka. So off we go for a short 3 day weekend trip! Our group was around 11 people, with 2 other people who lives at Melaka. We left at around 7am, in an attempt to beat the jam. But apparently everybody thought the same thing, so by the time we crossed the causeway, it was already 9am or so. Day 1 itinerary: Travel from Singapore to Melaka Pit stop at Pagoh Lunch @ Restoran Keng-Dom Check in to Hatten Hotel Free & Easy Dinner at Aunty Lee Jonker Street We had a quick roti prata breakfast at Pagoh rest stop, which was already 200km from Singapore or so. Nothing exceptional, besides the much needed toilet break. Another 40 minutes or so, we’re finally in Melaka! Arrival time, 11.40am and since hotel check ins are typically 2pm onwards, we decided to go grab lunch first. Lunch choice was a chinese style steamboat restaurant called Restoran Keng-Dom. One of their speciality was a beef steamboat. However, you need to preorder hours before, so that they can marinate the beef slices. On top of that, we ordered quite a number of the usual chinese ‘tze char’ style dishes. 13 people is quite a sqeeze on this table for sure! The first dish was a pastry crust curry chicken. In my opinion, it’s largely a gimmick, since after you remove the pastry on top, it’s just really curry chicken. The pastry does seem like roti prata though, so it’s used as a dip. In term of the curry, it’s not that fantastic. It...
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Without knowing, it is the final day of the Bangkok trip. Since we have to get to the airport in the evening, the program for today was very light. A maiden visit to Bangkok’s highest restaurant was decided on, with the rest of the afternoon kept for final shopping at platinum mall. Bangkok Sky Restaurant is located on the 76th and 78th floor of Baiyoke Sky Hotel, which is really walking distance from Platinum Mall. My hotel was rather far at Asoke, so taxi was probably the best way for me. Food wise, it was really quite underwhelming. The standard finger foods, 1 station for japanese sushi/sashimi, 1 station for pad thai, 1 station for pasta (which is probably one of the better choices), 1 station for thai noodles, 1 station for grilled meats, and the usual dessert and beverage booth. But I guess for 840baht, the view makes it worthwhile. They also had balloon entertainers walking around to make complimentary balloon shapes to entertain the kids. I felt that was a refreshing thing to see since most of the crowd tend to be tourists and tourists just like to be entertained. The views from the 78th floor were great! In the 3rd pic, the dark green patch in the middle-left of the picture close to the horizon is Chatuchak In the 4th pic, Amari watergate, Platinum mall, Central world is right at your doorstep! No matter, as long as you taper your expectations about the food, it is actually fairly decent. The views more than make up for it. In fact, you can go to the 84th floor, which is a revolving open air rooftop with a view of the entire bangkok horizon! With that, it was time to head back to Singapore and to earn money to fly back to Bangkok again! :o) As a recap, here are the other days of the trip! Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day...
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Suan lum night market has been one of the ‘must visit’ places in Bangkok for a tourist to go. However, the land lease expired in 2007, and the tenants had been illegally occupying the landtill Jan/Feb of 2011 before they were all chased away. And suddenly, there’s nowhere to go to experience the night market atmosphere in Bangkok! In the recent months, the closest replacement is Tawanna Square, which is somewhat like a wholesale center but extended outdoors using tentages. The day started with a quick visit to the tailors to do the fitting for my orders. For people who do tailoring while skipping the fitting session, you might as well just buy off the shelf. The fitting for both the tailors I used were quite good, but as expected, alterations had to be made in order for it to be better fitted. A quick meal at Pasta ‘n’ Noodles was surprisingly good! It was just one of those restaurant type places along the road near Nana BTS. The food looked decent and the price was good, so we went in. And as usual, we were the only customers in the restaurant. Now I’m wondering where do locals eat!?! After that we made our way to Phetchaburi MRT station to get to Asoke Pier which was just walking distance away. One of the unique feature of Bangkok is how river transport is an essential form of transport there. From 1 end of the river to the other, it’s probably around a 80 minutes boat ride, and if you were to travel the same distance on taxi, it would have probably cost 200 baht and maybe 2 hours given the traffic congestions! Tawanna Square is located right beside Mall Bangkapi, which is a pretty large mall in a suburban type of district. But most importantly, it has it’s own pier! Being tourists, it makes more sense to ‘do as the locals do’ and take the boats rather than to rely on taxis right? There’s basically...
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