Dutch influences in the Malaysian culture

Finding Dutch influences in the Malaysian culture was my third personal objective. I have researched this by asking my colleagues and locals what they knew about the Netherlands. Besides that I have been to Malacca, one of the places where the Dutch have had some influence in Malaysia. The Dutch East India Company beat the Portuguese in 1641, and they colonized Malacca until the Brits came (Ars, 2001). Malacca was an important key in trade. In Malacca there is still a lot to see of the Dutch influence in Malaysia. The old ‘Stadthuys’ is still in use, it’s a museum now. There is a small church that’s painted orange from the inside. And on the main square a small windmill is a great attraction for tourists. Graves at the church still contain classic Dutch inscriptions.
In the rest of Malaysia I haven’t seen (because there isn’t any) very much of Dutch influences. The only influences there are are from Dutch football stars, whose names are printed on the many (fake) football shirts that are sold on the markets. When Malaysians find out you are from ‘bollanda’ they always start talking about Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten and Ruud van Nistelrooij.
The Netherlands is trying to promote itself in Malaysia though. I went to Malacca when ‘the Holland days’ were organized in the little town. These days had the goal to put the Netherlands in a broad daylight and prejudices about the country had to be eliminated. The theme was ‘Holland, more than tulips’. But of course, the things you could do were making photographs with people in traditional Dutch clothing and life like cows, eat typical Dutch food like ‘poffertjes’, ‘kroketten’ and cheese, buy ‘Delfts blauw’ and wooden shoes as souvenirs and see a movie about the Dutch tulips. So much for trying to prevent prejudices about the Netherlands...
The influence Dutch people have these days, is like I have experienced many times, is on the photographs of people. As discussed earlier: people are always interested in you as a foreigner, and Dutch people have a great reputation (although many people don’t know Holland but they do know Amsterdam). When I was visiting the national zoo in KL with some flatmates, it seemed we where the main attraction – people did not see a 2 metre tall blond guy (one of my flatmates) that often.
In Malaysia there still is the idea that western people are much more wealthy than Asian people. During my internship I was thinking about buying a laptop in Malaysia or Singapore, as electronics are way cheaper there than in Europe. When I was asking my colleagues where to get the best deals they were talking about laptops being around 1000 US dollar in Malaysia. When I told them I wanted to look for a cheaper one they were surprised: I could certainly come up with 1000 USD as a foreigner?