Just arrived back from our very well deserved 3 days off in Melaka which is a couple of hours south from KL on the coast. We were planning to have some time swimming and chilling out on the beach but it turns out Melaka has some of the dirtiest water in the world so we stayed in town and did lots of sightseeing instead!

It's a really nice, chilled out place to spend a few days away from KL. We stayed in Chinatown in a bizarre little hostel called Sama Sama which was full of slightly strange hippy men who sat around all day in hammocks listening to Bob Marley! Apart from the odd other residents it was really good though as we were in the centre of town and could easily walk to all the sights.

Chinatown was absolutely gorgeous - full of little art galleries and trinket shops in beautiful old Dutch style houses from when Melaka was a colony. We went to look round the Baba Nyonya museum (the Baba Nyonya are Melakkans who are mixed Chinese/Malay) which was absolutely gorgeous. It's an old family house still decorated and set up exactly as a traditional Baba Nyonya home with beautiful wood carvings and embroidery everywhere.

Melaka is a huge tourist destination in Malaysia and when we went on a boat trip down the river (instead of braving the sea!) the guide was telling us that the state government is spending an absolute fortune redeveloping all the houses along the riverside and returning them to the traditional 19th century colonial style so in a few years it will look absolutely gorgeous. It was pretty impressive when we went even without all that work as they took us up the river to a traditional Malay village where the houses are all on stilts and we saw plenty of monitor lizards swimming alongside the boat, even in the centre of town.

The only slightly disappointing thing about the trip was the sound and light show. This is in all the guidebooks as Melaka's finest evening entertainment so we eagerly went along on our first night. It turned out to be slightly underwhelming... We sat in an outside auditorium space facing all the main sights of the town expecting something very impressive but actually got to watch them light up all the monuments one after the other while a scratched CD played a track of some very overdramatic people describing the town's history! It would have been quite interesting as so many different powers have controlled this area - Portugal, Holland, England... but it was so over-dramatic and not always very easy to understand we were left feeling very glad it cost us less than a pound and only lasted about 45mins!

So tomorrow it's back to the second week at the YWCA Vocational Training Opportunity Centre. The first week was pretty hard as we were teaching for 4 hours in the morning and then trying to come up with activities for another couple of hours in the afternoon every day with very limited space and resources but it actually went really well. My English lessons mostly consisted of playing games and chatting but the girls all seemed to really enjoy themselves.

It's very hard to know though because despite some of them being my age, they're treated very differently. They come to this centre from all over Malaysia for a year to study a particular practical skill like sewing or cookery and during that time they aren't allowed to leave the YWCA at all. It's run slightly like a prison camp - the library and games room are kept locked up at all times, they have to stand up as soon as a teacher enters the room and everything is run very strictly. So when you ask them if they've enjoyed an activity the only answer you ever get is 'yes madam.'

I think they are really enjoying our classes though. I've done some dance with them which I think went down well although they were all absolutely exhausted afterwards. Since they don't ever leave the building, they don't really do any exercise apart from a few who are allowed to go to aerobics once or twice a week. So an hour and a half of dance came as a bit of a shock! We're also trying to do some other fun activities with them since all they really do is work: making paper flowers was a big hit and so was the ping pong tournament. They have a games room in the building but despite being there since January, at least half of the girls said they had never played table tennis before which I thought was really upsetting.

It's not that the staff who run the place don't want them to do things, they're all really glad we're here and very keen to help us do anything we want. They just have the mindset that everything has to stay locked up because the girls can't be trusted not to break or lose things which seems really unfair. When I asked for a CD player for my dance classes I was told they didn't have one because they would only break it.

But hopefully now that we've done the first week things will start to relax a bit. We're the first volunteers to have gone in but they would really like to make it a permanent arrangement so we were always going to be the ones to have to battle a bit for the resources and space that we need. The main thing is that the girls seem to be enjoying having us around - they were thrilled when we said we would be coming back after Melaka so fingers crossed we can keep them entertained for another week!

Anyway sorry to have written a bit of an essay but I realised it's been quite a while since I updated this and I seem to have done lots since then! Keep the messages coming, it's lovely to hear everyone's news.

xx