Malaysia - Day 8

Day 8 - Sunday 23 September:

Our group with Ps Thomas

The morning started with church at our partner congregation - Luther House Congregation. We arrived a bit late - 9am for an 8.30 service (we only arrived at the restaurant for breakfast at 8.30) - but there were still people who arrived after us, including the man who was being baptised that day (he arrived about 2 minutes before they called him up to be baptised). The sermon lasted about 45 minutes, but the time went quickly as it was quite interesting. It used the analogy of being stuck in a traffic jam to use godly wisdom. Pastor Thomas was very friendly and we had a chat with him after the service. We even got a special welcome as visitors.

After church we left for Melaka. We stopped at the Melaka Lutheran Church - Pastor Calvin's first congregation - mostly made up of university students, so it is very youth orientated. From there we went on to lunch (about 2.30pm by this point), and then to our accommodation: House of Kititto. It was a guest house, so it had a shared common area and bathrooms.  Chloe, Erin, Jesse and I shared 2 double beds in one room. After a quick rest and toilet break we walked into Jonker Street which is where Melaka's night markets are held.

Our group with some of the Melaka youth group

The night markets were very busy, and had lots of fascinating items. There were souvenirs, bags, clothes, gadgets, food and craft items. We wandered the streets for a couple of hours before meeting up at the Calanthe Arts Cafe, where our tour guide for Monday owned the cafe and jewelery shop.  We had a late dinner, sat and chatted for a while, and eventually started back to our accommodation. It was about 10.30pm by now and the stalls were starting to pack up, but we stopped so many times that it took us almost 45 minutes to walk the 15 minute journey back to the guest house.  I fell asleep quite quickly.