Oh … hello!! Welcome to the chronicles of Rock-awn. The third instalment sees our heroines travel from the island of Kuching to Penang island.
In Penang, we based ourselves out of George Town which is the capital city in the state of Penang as well as a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site. We were both looking forward to this part of the trip the most and had 3 main objectives:
- explore the street art that this area is famous for
- eat our way through the food as this area is known for its hawker stands and culinary variety
- meet up with Sarah, a classmate of mine from my yoga teacher training in the Philippines
I think we were pretty successful at accomplishing our tasks!
Penang was a hit the moment we arrived. We fell in love immediately with the place we would be calling home for the next four days. Kudos to DawnO for hooking us up! George Town is made up of old renovated buildings and our accommodation is a renovated Chinese medical hall wholesaler. It is gorgeous!! Hardwood that reminds me of the plantation house my mom’s parents spent time working at in her very early years, polished concrete, a deck that looks out into a quiet courtyard. It’s perfect!
We spent a lot of our first day hunting for the various street art locations. There is a tourist map which marks the more well known ones, but we have also simply wandered around and stumbled upon them. They are soooo cool and the interactive ones are lots of fun. I imagine the locals roll their eyes at the tourists climbing up onto swing sets and posing on motorbikes, but when in Penang . . . . . .
We’ve done pretty good experimenting with different food. We do draw some lines however, and haven’t ventured to try the fish head porridge or anything with intestines. Maybe it’s our loss? It would take a lifetime to try all of the different foods here, but so far my favourite meal has been the Asam Laksa (a sour tamarind based noodle soup) and nutmeg juice which is famous in this area. My second fav would be the free breakfast at our place consisting of western serve yourself stuff and a different Indian snack on offer. And my third fav would be the Indian food which is probably a given that it’s amazing as we are staying in the heart of little India.
It’s been great to meet up with Sarah who lives here in Penang. Sarah and I spent the final month of my teacher training together, and we became quite close during that month together. She is still the kind, caring, loving person that I remember and it has been wonderful to reconnect after these years. She was kind enough to meet us soon after we arrived and help to get us oriented. We also got to go to one of her yoga classes and it was great to meet her class and practice some things from teacher training that I actually haven’t done in awhile.
Malaysia is this cool fusion of different cultures and religions and I love to see all of the different temples mosques and churches. It appears that everyone seems to get along, so it was interesting to talk to Sarah to hear about this undercurrent of inequality. The country is also filled with these blue flags of scales which apparently represent the election that they have coming up. She was telling us that it should be peaceful, but . . . . . . . In that case I’m glad we won’t be there for that as it happens on Wednesday which is the day that we leave.
We did get to the beach on this island for one day with Sarah and her partner Tong. Even though I am a beach person, I’m Ok with not spending a lot of time here this vacation (especially after seeing the multitudes of jelly fish swimming by when we rode the ferry the other day). So by request I taught a yoga class on the beach, marvelled at the amazing sunset and spent our last night here with friends it was the perfect way to end this chapter
Check back later to find out about the final instalment in the chronicles of Malaysia: Rock-awn 2.0
For more sights of Penang, click on pics in the gallery below
Love the shots of you and the “interactive” street art.