Penang

Alright! Tine to continue to try to blog here, as the longer I put this off, the harder it will be for me to update all Ive done. I'm already over a week behind. So Penang is an island on the Northwestern side of Peninsular Malaysia.

Penang is a culturally rich island, with a strong colonial and trading past as it was up there in major ports back in the day. Therefore, there's a lot of history and museums and old forts you can check out. It's also (and better for me) known as a highly rich culinary melting pot, as it has Chinese, Indian, Malay and Thai ethnic minorities all over the island. Therefore, when in Penang... you eat!


I couch surfed again while I was in Penang with a man names Ang. He's a Chinese Malay, and works part time at the Chinese cultural center, and also other centers around town. This means he's a huge wealth of information on things to do.

The first night, there was a thrown together BBQ for a group of Singaporeans who were traveling through Malaysia on an eating tour. Last minute looked more like 4 days prep, as there was a HUGE buffet of seafood and meats to BBQ, and homemade dishes and drinks and appetizers. Quite an amazing "last minute" party. I got to meet other couch surfers from Poland, California, Germany, and Malaysia, and some expats from Britain and Japan who live in penang. It's quite the network of people, so once you know someone, you meet half the city.

I also had made some friends from the Cameron Highlands (Switzerland, Canada and Brazil) and I met up with them while I was there. It's always nice to be a completely worldly group of kids roaming around. We spent the next day going to a hill on top of Penang, taking a funicular to the top. The problem was when we got there we had a two hour wait, so we walked (hottest day possible) to some temples and then the funicular took 30+ minutes, and then at the top you had to wait 20-30 minutes before the 30+ minute ride down. It ended up being an all day affair.

After the funicular we went to meet Ang and have dinner at an Indian Cultural center, where everything is free and its run on donations (it was packed) and then to a Disabled Home to meet some people Ang does volunteer work with. It was a good day/night and got to see some stuff otherwise not on the tourist trail, which is always nice.

The last day I spent walking the whole of the city with a couch surfer from CA and was sweating horrible, per usual, until we found hidden aircon machines at the historic Fort in town, in the bunkers, and stood directly in front of them for an extended period of time, before running to the next one. Wasn't too bad of an afternoon, and we had a big couch surfing meetup for dinner, where one of them gave me a ride to the bus station to catch an overnight to the islands on the East coast.