Penang

Alright it's been a few days, the pictures are FINALLY uploaded and I'm ready to start this post about my Penang trip!

Last Thursday, my grandma and I took a plane ride to Penang, Malaysia.

We were there for four days and three nights.

The flight on Jetstar was relatively painless. In an hour, we found ourselves in the Pearl of the Orient.

Penang is a large island off the Northwest coast of Malaysia. It has mountains, rivers and is of course surrounded by the sea. I guess people go there for its old school charm and delicious food.

All the pictures that I managed to take were little miracles in themselves. The reason being that my camera is now just a piece of junk. It keeps taking either overexposed or strange pictures with lines all over the screen. I would say that only 30% of my attempted photography ended up somewhat of normal quality.

:*(

I'm not a professional photographer but I really need a working camera!

The view from the hotel room balcony was really calming. Not to mention, it was usually sunny enough out there that we could dry our clothes after washing them.

Nanny absolutely refused to share a bed with me and opted for a double bed room instead.

We barely set our stuff down before hurrying off for dinner at Gurney Drive.

Penang is not known to be a food heaven of sorts for nothing. The following pictures are only a few examples of the amazing Malay and Chinese food that may be familiar to the Singaporean ear but extinct in the hawker centres.

Pasembur- a local Indian rojak-ish lookalike dish. I forgot what's in there but it was really nice.

Assam laksa, Penang style.

Char kway teow and chicken feet stewed in soy sauce.

Prawn mee, Char kway teow and Oyster omelette.

Tomyam soup, Mango salad and Pineapple rice. This is actually food we had at a Thai restaurant in Prangin Mall. I thought it would probably be substandard, but even critical Nanny admitted that it was comparable to the real deal in Thailand. The food was simply amazing! The restaurant is called Thai Station if I'm not wrong.

Curry mee. I suppose this is Penang's version of our local Laksa.

For tourists and locals alike, Gurney Drive is the place to go for dinner.

This is Prangin Mall, one of the only two places that we went shopping at.

The second place would be Batu Ferringhi, a gigantic night market that stretches along the coast for more than a mile. Lots of fake branded stuff for sale here.

Even though the stalls are mostly closed in the daytime, Batu Ferringhi is still a busy area.

By the way, the photos are a bit in random order and I'm just too lazy to delete them and reload them in order. It took me well over a day to get them all off my camera and onto Blogger.

This is the Town Hall of Penang. I wanted to see this building because the brochure said that this was where a scene in the movie "Anna and the King" was shot. Sadly, my camera only managed to churn out this one picture of the building. The rest of the pictures all turned out to be a big patch of white. There were also other old school stuff near the Town Hall like the City Hall and some fort/cannon looking thing but....

Argh!

Another place we visited was the Clan Jetties.

Along the Northeast coast of Penang, there are jetties known to be villages organised by clan association. For example, if your surname is "Chew", you'd be living in the Chew Jetty... If your parents were in some maritime industry like fishing of course.

The Chew Jetty held special meaning for us since my grandfather was a Chew.

I was shocked that there were still people living there. But then again, life didn't look too shabby. It was midday and there were women lying by the doorways taking what looked to be very comfortable naps.

That uncle in the picture is the taxi driver we hired for 4 hours to take us to any destination we wanted.

He was quite a bad tour guide, but... oh well.

Must be interesting to live in a UNESCO World Heritage site...

After the clan jetties, the taxi driver uncle brought us to this roadside stall because Nanny said she wanted to eat some Malaysian durians.

The durians turned out to be a supreme waste of money- 20 ringgit each and none of them bitter enough to excite our tastebuds. Nanny was very much unimpressed with the taxi driver's recommendation.

A rare working moment for my camera! I finally managed to take a nice picture of the coast from the car...

Also dropped by the Penang Butterfly Farm. Like the rest of the island, the farm was filled with Arab tourists. I felt as if I was in a Star Wars movie, what with all the Arab women swishing around in their long black robes, covered up to their eyes.

A really beautiful and weird plant/flower thing.

Fishies.

There were hundreds of butterflies everywhere.

But actually the farm wasn't that big. It only took us about 15 minutes to peruse the entire premises.

Arabs everywhere... Nanny and I thought we could faint from the smell of men and armpits. I really don't know how they could survive in a humid and hot place like Malaysia under all those layers.

Looking for our favourite species.

Me in the outdoor garden.

We requested to go to the beach since it was beautiful and sunny out.

It looks nice right? But in reality, the water wasn't as clear as in Tioman. It was murky and smelled like the Singapore River.

She refused to go out into the sun. Stayed under the natural umbrella instead.

Of the three days spent there, the first was for shopping, the second for sightseeing and the last for just relaxing. We also did some amount of tv watching in the hotel cum roast chicken or chicken wings.

Then it was time to leave...

Fortunately, my camera decided to behave on the car ride back to the airport. I tried to snap as many pretty old buildings as I could.

Then it was goodbye to the mountains....

Watched the sunset from the plane taking off.

And the reason I was able to watch the sunset is that our flight was delayed from 1530 to 1945! We didn't find out until we got to the airport so we had to wait at that miserable little place for 6 hours (we got there early). Jetstar gave us each a food coupon that we could use at the "airport restaurant". An enquiry at the information counter revealed that the "airport restaurant" was actually McDonalds.

FAIL!

I was so happy when we finally got on the plane.

After being back from Penang, I've been spending some time with my dad before going to Bali next week.

Wonder what God has in store for me............?

Whatever it is, I know He's already got it handled.

:)