Penang

.
Since we wouldn't need a car on the island of Penang (named after the indigenous Pinang Palm tree) we took the Nice bus from KL station to Georgetown. A friend of Isaac, Ken, took us during rush hour to the station and we just about made it.... It takes roughly 4 hours and is very comfortable. Reclining seats, some food and drinks are provided and there are only 22 seats in the bus and all that for 50 RM one way (4.41 RM per Euro).
The Eastern & Oriental Hotel was everything we thought it would be...colonial grandeur at it's best. It had suffered from the tsunami last year but only slightly so. Huge rooms and bathrooms etc. but furnished like your Granny would have loved it. Call buttons for your personal butler in each room, fresh fruit each day in your room and a fabulous pool.
We hadn't prepared ourselves for Penang at all in the way that we hadn't looked up anything on the internet beforehand (so unlike us) so we wandered around the town without actually knowing where we're going. But we found the Penang museum.. a treasure trove of information on the town itself and the people that shaped it. There are so many cultures that make up Penang, the Malay, Chinese, Eurasians, Burmese, Indians, Armenians, Japanese and Europeans. Some of the groups mixed and some not at all. The most successfull group were the Chinese (also known as the Baba Nyonya) who built some beautiful mansions to show off their wealth amassed through trade. The most beautiful are the Cheon Fatt Tze mansion and the very ornate Pinang Peranakan mansion. See picture.....

The other interesting feature here in Penang is the abundance of Kongsi, or clan houses of the different Chinese clans. Used for the settling in and general wellfare of their clansmen. The most famous being the Khoo Kongsi established only in 1850.

Met up with Sulynn (a fellow student from Nagasaki) and her boyfriend Joey Tan to have dinner at street stalls (known here as hawker stalls) and to sample the delicious Penang laksa, a curried soup with shrimp paste...a treat indeed. Had coffee and huge cakes for afters.
Like in Thailand, here too you can have a massage but a more gentle one than the fierce pressure point massage in Thailand and they use oil too. They concentrate on the ligaments and by Jove, you feel like a tenderized chicken afterwards.......