Somewhere in Penang, near the Achehnese Mosque
Penang is actually another pretty unique place in Northern Peninsular Malaysia. Like Ipoh, it has its own special variety of famous hawker food, - laksa, chee cheong fun with shrimp paste!! (sounds yecch but it’s actually quite appetizing), fried koay teow (with Chinese sausages, cockles, prawns, oysters, …yummy), and loads of nyonya food (nyonya’s actually the colloquial term for the Chinese who have settled down and kinda adopted Malay culture in many aspects, such as food!).
Unlike Ipoh, Penang hasn’t really discarded its colonial past with as much zeal as Ipoh or for the matter of fact, any other towns or cities in Malaysia. For example, the capital of Penang is still officially named Georgetown, not that many locals use this name (they just fondly call it Penang (which actually refers to the island as a whole) or Tanjung (which means cape in Malay, how unimaginative can it be huh? There must be a thousand Tanjungs in a maritime country like Malaysia!)
The result of this err… reluctance in moving ahead (ala Malaysia) is that it has so much more character, with narrow streets (and of course traffic jams, what do you expect when the streets are narrow), with colonial bungalows and buildings, rustic pre-war Chinese styled shop-houses and hordes and hordes of temples, Chinese, Thai, Burmese and Hindu, not to mention quaint mosques and churches. And of course, you still have the ferries that carry you across to the mainland. Kinda like a trading town that time stood still!
And last but not least, it still retains street names like Love Lane, Chulia Street, Gurney Drive, which is so much more err… romantic than the lengthy nationalistic names which nobody remembers anyway.
Gurney Drive, Penang - how can there not be a picture of the sea when you're in Penang Island huh?
