This is day two of Arie's trip to Penang. You may want to
start at day one.
Saturday, January 6th. I woke up early so that I could read the newspaper and have some breakfast (our hotel had an excellent breakfast buffet). I'm glad I did. The Star, which is otherwise the worst newspaper I've seen that wasn't produced on a photocopier, had a wonderful article about Jews in New York. It wasn't news, not even soft news, just sort of, "Hey, there are Jews in New York, they brought bagels to the city, and they keep kosher (which is Hebrew for 'halal')." I read it a few times but remained absolutely baffled by its appearance in a local newspaper in Penang (it was written by a Star staff writer, not syndicated).
We tried to take the shuttle into town, but apparently the hotel requires you to reserve it two hours ahead of time, and also it goes to the mall, not town. Oh well, a cab was 20 ringgit ($6). The cab dropped us at a mall too, but one closer to town.
We walked through Chinatown and Little India. As noted, Chinese is the most represented ethnicity in Penang, and "Chinatown" is most of the downtown. Much more so than any other Chinatown I've seen, it seemed less alloyed with the influence of the surrounding cultures. For reasons unclear to us as of yet, most stores were closed.
George Town is a beautiful city. It's small, only about 200,000 people, and you can walk across the downtown in thirty minutes. The architecture is largely Chinese-influenced and at times highly ornate, and the colors are very saturated. Little India is not as architecturally impressive (excepting the temples), but it does smell very good. We ate in an Indian restaurant; the food was excellent, and so cheap that we at first thought the menu prices were in dollars, not ringgit (the exchange rate was about 3.5 ringgit to the dollar).
After the downtown, we walked up to the colonial district. The big sight there is Fort Cornwallis, built on the spot where Francis Light first landed (and named for the guy who failed to stop the American revolution). It was built with convict labor, of course, and is lined with cannons (mostly made by the Dutch, stolen by pirates, and recovered by the British). There's one large cannon named Seri Rambai that was made by the Dutch in 1603 as a present for the Sultan of Johor. When Johor was conquered by the Acehnese, it was given to the Sultan of Selangor, who was robbed of it by pirates, and then the British got it back in 1871. Allegedly the cannon can make childless women conceive, though I'm not sure how and I hope it doesn't involve gunpowder.
Fort Cornwallis has been made into a tourist attraction, but a very low-key one. We were just about the only tourists there. There was a sign saying you could rent a period costume for photos, and now that I think about it, all the employees were wearing period costumes. We walked around a bit, dodged the various chickens and parrots that were hanging around, and walked through the gunpowder magazine.
The Fort also has an exhibit about Sir Francis Light, the founder of George Town. Most suspicious about it was his "wife"; the exhibit switches between calling her a wife, a consort, and a mistress. His will (on display) makes various provisions for her, but in it he describes her as the 'woman who has cohabited with me'. (Incidentally, the will is poorly drafted--it provides her with an economic reward should her children die.) There's a statue of Francis Light in front of the Penang Museum, but apparently it was modeled on his son (who founded Adelaide in Australia, so Light's concubine probably didn't kill him) because no one at the time knew what he looked like.
We took a taxi back to the hotel, and on the way, asked the driver why everything was closed. He explained that it was a mandatory holiday, then clarified that it was only mandatory for the government, businesses could decide whether to open. We were unable to discern the name of the holiday (but stay tuned).
We decided to kayak a little in the ocean, and fortunately, our hotel provided free non-motorized water sports. The guys didn't want to give us a kayak, they claimed because the waves were too strong, but I think because they didn't want to carry it down to the beach. We paddled around for a bit, the current was strong, but that just made it more fun.
I heard there was a night market a few miles north from our hotel, and I figured it would have a food court, so we took a taxi up there for dinner. On the way, our driver mentioned that most stores were closed for the holiday. We asked him what holiday it was. He said: "Weekend." I miss New York.
The night market was at a region of Penang called Ferringhi Beach. It was surrounded by restaurants (including the excellently named "Wizard of Food"), but we eschewed them in favor of the food court. It was a great system--every table had a number, and the tables were surrounded by food vendor stalls. You claim a table, then go around to stalls, order food, and tell them your table number. When it's ready, they bring it out to you. We sat and ate for a few hours (Penang has really good food), and just as we were ready to leave, it started pouring. They quickly roofed over the food court, so we stuck around to eat some more food and watch a British football game, which was inexplicably on the public televisions. After dinner, we walked around the market a bit--very touristy, but funny stuff--and then headed home.
The historical and social information in this entry mostly comes from Lonely Planet: Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore, which is unfortunate because that book sucks. The maps of George Town were wrong, it barely had any information about Malaysian food, it left us in the dark about important facts, and it had entirely the wrong idea about various sights and activities. If I go back, I'm taking Frommer's instead.
Read on for day three, which is long and involves various religious places, but I think it's interesting.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home