Penang

After a 23 minute flight from Langkawi we arrived at our guesthouse in Georgetown at about 10.30am. Amazingly our room was ready, so we checked straight in and headed out to explore. First, we had a couple of things to do – post some bits home as we are getting tight with flight baggage allowances, also I (Chris) wanted a haircut. It was about a 20 minute walk to the post office, and when we got there we found it was closed on Sundays – I was quite annoyed as this now meant we had to carry the stuff we were posting around all day with us. We then walked another 15-20 mins to the hairdressers, which was fully booked. Although the morning was a bit of a failure, we did love walking through the streets of Georgetown. It is so full of character with the beautiful architecture, colours and friendly people. It feels so chilled out, especially for an Asian city which are usually so hectic. Even the traffic is very calm here, with everyone driving around so slowly. You can also really feel the British colonial influence here, with the architecture, UK plug sockets and people driving on the left.

We then walked up to Little India, this was a really vibrant area with lots of bright colours and loud music playing. As the Indian food has been so good in SE Asia, we decided to find a place to grab some lunch. We both had curry and rice, and to be honest it was pretty mediocre. The curry sauce was very thin and not particularly flavourful.

After this we went to a little Chinese coffee shop and Lisa ordered a dragon ball, it was a scoop of coconut ice cream coated in crushed ice and then covered in a rose syrup, however, the ice cream tasted like durian (the popular stinky fruit here in SE Asia). Lisa asked the lady if she had made a mistake and put durian instead of coconut but she said it was 100% coconut and that Lisa must have a phobia of durian. The durian smell is so strong we think it must have tainted the flavour of the other ice creams.

We decided to drop our stuff back in the room, and then walked back into the centre. We spent some time walking around exploring the interactive street art (for which Georgetown is famous for). We also wandered down some of the jetties (Chew Jetty is the main one), where people live on in stilted houses. There are lots of Chinese immigrants in Georgetown, and the jetty really reminded us of Tai O – the stilted fishing village we visited in Hong Kong. We stopped by a hawker centre (street food outlets) in the evening for some food, and then headed back to the guesthouse for an early night.

Day 2

We started with a second attempt at posting some stuff home. We were quite confused when we arrived, and stood by a counter for a while waiting for someone. Then we saw a load of locals press a button for a ticket when they arrived, so we did the same. But of course after waiting for our number to be called, we found out we’d pressed the wrong button, so had to queue up a second time. Once we arrived at the correct counter, the ladies were super helpful (and so was google translate!). We sent back about 4KG of souvenirs and clothes which cost about £50, so not cheap, but cheaper than paying extra baggage allowance on the flights.

We tried a few different foods today which our guesthouse had recommended to us. First stop was a little Chinese tea house, where we had a Chinese cookie and egg tart. The Chinese cookie was quite dry and not really to my taste. The egg tart was lovely though, very similar to the egg tarts we have in the UK, but not as sweet and with a more flakey pastry (and the same as the one we had in Hong Kong).

We also stopped at a bakery for coconut tart, which was delicious, I would definitely have those again. The bakery also let us try some pepper biscuit, which tasted much better than it sounds.

Later in the afternoon we went to the Antarabangsa Enterprise, which apparently has the cheapest beer in Georgetown. It was a really cool place with lots of tables outside, and shortly after arriving a local gentleman (Andrew) asked if he could join us. We had a nice chat with him, he said he works at a hotel 6 days a week and stops there for a beer most evenings after work. I told him all about Watford FC of course. The Premier League is really popular all over Asia, so it’s a pretty easy conversation starter – especially when people see my Watford shirt. There are so many Liverpool fans in Malaysia, and of course they have all been proudly wearing their shirts. The guesthouse owners are all Kopites and every time I walk in they start chanting ‘Watford!’, then hold up their Liverpool shirts and start talking about their Champions League victory.

We’d heard Assam Laksa is a very famous Malaysian dish, so headed to Penang Road Teochew Chendul to try some. Lisa ordered this, and I ordered a Curry Mee, which Andrew had told us is his favourite Malaysian dish. We both agreed I won this one! The Assam Laksa was tasty, with a big mix of flavours (fish, sour, spicy, sweet), but the Curry Mee was delicious! It was very similar to the Penang Curry we had in Thailand, and was a creamy, delicately spiced curry. It was more of a soup than a curry, but still very nice. For desert we had a Chendul, which is green rice flour jelly, coconut milk, kidney beans and crushed ice. I don’t usually like kidney beans, but they worked really well in this. It was quite a nice desert to be fair, but I don’t think I’ll be rushing back for another.

Day 3

In the morning we took a walking tour. Our guide grew up in Georgetown and took us around some of the local art pieces, temples and historic buildings telling us about the history. We learnt that a lot of people on the island were from India or China, the Indians brought over by the British to build the roads and the Chinese promised wealth from working in the tin mines, he said back then most people in China were very poor and they often just started a new life in Malaysia because they couldn’t afford to return or they lost contact with relatives as if they ever sent a letter home to their family, all the villagers would know and ask how much money had been sent and that they wanted some of it too, so no money no letter. He told us of the Chinese maffia and showed us where these gangs operated from during the tour. His family were originally from China, and he told us how a lot of people would die of starvation in China back then, and in that fact his grandmother died of starvation. They couldn’t understand why, as although she couldn’t afford to feed herself, her son gave her food. They then found out she had been putting the local hungry children first and passing all the food to them.

We had been recommended to try the coffee shop China House, it had over 50 different types of cakes and the servings were huge we actually couldn’t manage to eat it all and took the rest home for supper. The China House was massive and ran from one street to the next through a thin long building, a couple of doors down was an art corridor with some more amazing art inside.

We went back to our favourite bar for an evening beer, thinking we might bump into Andrew again when he finished work, however, this evening a local called Dennis sat with us. Dennis was about 36 hours into a drinking session and sat with 3 cans of 6.9% Fosters in front of him. He owns a guesthouse which he was inviting us to stay at and spent most of the time complaining about the guests from last night. He also invited us back to his guesthouse for a party, which we politely declined. He was pleasant enough to be honest, but quite hard work so we finished our drinks and left (not before he was telling us he used to play football for the Malaysian national team – not sure how true that was!). We were both hungry so stopped for some pork and rice not far from the bar which had been recommended to us. It was a busy street food restaurant, and we managed to get one of the last tables. The food was very simply plain rice with the pork roasted on a spit. It was so simple, yet so tasty – we both loved it.

The next morning we took a Grab to the airport to catch our flight to Sumatra, which we were both very excited about!

Chris and Lisa x