We were not very Impressed with the northern beaches otherwise... The shoreline is pretty where you can see it between buildings, but the seawater is murky and stinky, and things are too developed in a standard tourist hotel way to be so interesting to us. There are a lot of australian and some arabic tourists there. we did meet a family of South Indian background who were very welcoming, they had a nice lunch stand with great coffee and some nice pure veg potatoes with black mustard seed and dal. And a mother kitty with four baby kittens in a cardboard box.
We were so happy to be back in Georgetown to eat and explore some more. We did a repeat of "dried chilli frog" and then some battered fried frog, for "late lunch", and enjoyed a rainstorm down at Chew Jetty during the afternoon. We walked several times in the Armenian street neighborhood which is a great mix of Chinese clan houses (amazing temples and shrines), and Malay Muslim businesses, a few art stores. late at night we went to have delicious South Indian food, dosa and fish curry chettinad, then went around "shopping" for fake gold South Indian jewelry like I saw in Tanjore, south India, a year or so ago. At ten or eleven at night, "Little India" is by far the most entertaining place to be for people watching, its jewelry and sari and bollywood video store never seem to close and the local people are very good looking.
Today has been another full rich day. We were very happy at Chew Jetty but we had only reserved 3 nights. So we had to leave! but, Now we are in a beautifully restored building in an entire suite of rooms with polished dark wood floors, oriental carpets, fabulous Chinese antiques, a giant bathroom with views and one of those showers that is suspended high overhead and comes down on you like rain. Our bedroom is king sized and all our junky clothes are in their own little room.
Below us is a coffee store owned by the hotel, that also serves very fine French wines. We think, because we are still too wedded to eating out in our food courts and drinking Tiger beer.
Today we had South Indian breakfast of pooris, roti with egg and onion, chai tea and South Indian coffee, then we had an amazing restaurant meal of fish head curry with iced chrysanthem tea, later for a third meal we had Assam laksa fish stock noodles with lychee tea out at a huge temple east of here and for our fourth meal we had tofu puffs with sweet and sour sauce, chicken "pope's nose" nuggets, curry mee noodles, and Tiger beer.
Finally today we got to see just two of the many small museums and famous houses of George Town.we saw doctor Sun Yat Sens home, a traditional home with exquisite screens of dark carved wood dividing high ceilinged rooms filled with painted Chinese chests and curio display cabinets. We also finally saw the fabulous Khoo Kongsi which was a clan house, think football field sized courtyard with temples that are easily three stories in height, with carved stone pillars, giant gilded staircases, gleaming painted beams, high tiled roofs that soar, lots of ceramic tile dragons and mythical creatures seeming to fly right out of the rooflines, interiors filled with dark shining altars filled with Chinese gods or ancestor plaques,, and huge murals of classic Chinese themes and myths which I don't know well enough to describe and do justice to, but a true student of Chinese cultural history would be in heaven here.
We also got to go up onto Penang hill, a rainforested retreat the british uses to cool off which is 2500 feet above the city. You go on cool and cheap city buses out to the suburbs (not far but takes a while due to penangs famous traffic) and then can take a very steep funicular, we went just at sundown and seeing the city lights and some hills defining the outlines of the Straits of Malacca was very, very beautiful indeed. Also we shared our funicular car with a large family group from Qatar or somewhere similar, the ladies elegant in head to toe black and several of them, actually went and redraped theirselves when they noticed Craig so we could only barely see their eyes. Nice family, darling little girls and we had fun sharing the car with them.
And before we went up Penang Hill, we saw the stunning, disneyesque Kok Loksi temple, an amazing campus of huge over the top temples up an entire hillside, with"thousand Buddha" temples, Chinese gods, an enormous quan yin.... We gave up before seeing a third of it, because it was sooooo much and so mingled with shopping options. Hilarious really. Buy this angry gods t shirt and this shiny purse and those Kleenex tissues, and feed the turtles with our special greens, and take the expensive lift, get In line here in the middle of this store, because all the proceeds will go to the building fund! Jesus would have thrown the money changers outta there, for sure!
The reason I'm titling this blog "magic carpet ride" is that 1) I feel like this trip has been one 2) my legs ache so much from all our hiking and climbing that i wish I had one and 3) this hotel suite of ours, which is all ours no other visible guests in our part of the building, seems to have several on the floor in here. So pretty!
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