Gone To Penang Part One

Hmm.

The flight to Penang was incredibly short, no more than two hours excluding waiting time etc. Breakfast was a soggy affair, with the SIA stewardess depositing a very moist bit of bread which had bits of cucumber and cheese and pizza-like garnishing. I was trying very hard to ignore the fact that the paper-based packaging was disintegrating in my hands as I was holding it and trying to eat. Obviously not a very enjoyable experience. Even the coffee was crap.

We then landed in Penang, and I soon realised that the words Pinang (malay) and Penang (anglicised) were one and the same.. so I immediately recalled to the fact that I once confused Jalan Pinang with Jalan Penang. Right.

Weather was warm and bright and sunny when we landed. First thing we tried to get right was the collection of our luggage, and due to the fact that I was colour-blind and my dad is turning 51 this year, we managed to not recognise one of our bags as it passed us three times, much to our mutual amusement and subsequent quasi-panic, before we finally indentified it and exited the luggage claim area.

We had decided that maybe it would be better to stay in Georgetown (the so-called main city in Penang), and we chose to reserve a room in a certain Grand Hotel Continental. After a half-hour cab-ride to Georgetown (the cab was rattling incessantly and I was wondering if it would fall apart in the event that we were not travelling as two people, but rather a full family of four) and the moment I caught sight of the 'Grand Hotel Continental', I just slapped my head in dismay.

To put it in simple terms, the only grand bit about the Grand Hotel Continental was that it was old, derelict, run-down and crummy on a grand scale. The first room we entered somehow reminded me of those Russell Lee ghost stories which featured poltergeists in Malaysian hotel rooms, which then required bomohs to perform the customary cleansing and subsequent 'maybe you guys should change rooms' speech. It was so old, I was wondering if Mahathir was in power when this room was first built. I guess not.

The air-con was rattling like crazy, and amazingly both me and my dad managed a short nap before lunch, but more due to fatigue than anything else. We decided that maybe a change in rooms would do us some good, and frankly the view of the Penang bridge was nothing fantastic anyway.

So we changed rooms, and at first we thought it was slightly better (view was the same because only one floor higher), until I walked straight into a portion of carpet stained with mould. Mould. On a hotel room carpet. Much to my sinister amusement I soon observed the fact that the toilet room door was rotten at the base, and the plastic kettle in the room had a broken lid. So much for a three-star hotel. To make matters seem so much better in comparison, not one channel on the tv was static free, and I noticed that the windows had probably never been washed since the Indonesian Confrontation.

Lunch was rather interesting... roaming the streets for 5 minutes, we soon found this so-called shopping centre (the place was like a frickin time warp.. it even had that cheap indonesian 80's techno music playing in the hotel lifts) and the moment I caught sight of the first sign of modern civilisation (a KFC) I marched right in and asked my dad what he wanted to order.

Then it was the main reason we came to Penang: work.

From 2pm till 6pm in the evening, we slogged to set up that bit of machinery, and man I tell you, it was no small feat. The factory was producing medical equipment, and the bit where we worked in was the labelling of bottles filled with some vinegar-smelling liquid. I almost gagged when I first caught a whiff of the place. Gradually I got used to it, and we finally got out and back to the hotel (pathetic whimper).

Dinner was better than lunch or breakfast.. we had walked over to the Shangri-la hotel and got a proper chinese dinner (haha imagine living in a budget, tour-group type of hotel and then walking 5 min to have makan in a high-class hotel). We then went to a certain GAMA shopping centre (essentially a poor-man's Isetan-type of shopping mall, where you have everything from ashtrays to zippo-lighters, and all those in between) where the stuff you saw there was of a perculiar, suspiciously locally-made brand, which reminds you of the kind of things which exudes a social status only that which is slightly higher than the brands you would find in a Giant hypermart clothes section in a KL suburban area.

Naturally, we bought nothing... Until we went to the topmost level and found a putty-spatula (the bits of metal suck on a wooden handle used to apply wall-putty unto walls, commonly used by contractors) and bought it. I found it so funny: two guys walk into a 7-storey shopping mall, walk around for almost a half-hour and walk out with a 5-ringgit purchase.

Sleeping couldn't have been any less weird with a mouldy smell constantly permeating your nostrils and the fact that you did not want to be here in the first place... sigh... one down, three to go.


Cheers,

Crawldaddy