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Description
I inadvertently used the only photograph I took on this day for Day 30, so this is one of the Masjid Negeri, the Penang State Mosque, from tomorrow.

Day 34 - Friday 28 February

George Town

After being woken at two o’clock by the couple in the room next door returning - I thought the place was supposed to lock up at midnight - I slept soundly until eight o’clock, when once again woken by my neighbours. This time they were having an argument. I had previously thought that they were both German, so wondered why the argument, about the girl’s hair, took place in English. Maybe one of them was Scandinavian? Or perhaps they were simply practising their English! I didn’t get up until nearly ten o’clock and my guts still felt decidedly dodgy.

After breakfasting as usual at the Tye Ann Hotel I wandered along Lebuh Chulia to find somewhere to book a bus ticket for Tapah. My first choice, despite the Open sign on the door, was firmly locked and I continued on until arriving at Silver-Econ Travel. There were no problems about getting a seat for Sunday, although my preferred departure time of a quarter past eight was already fully booked and I had to settle for the ten-fifteen service. I thought this would probably mean I had greater difficulty in finding a bed when I arrived in Tanah Rata. The bus would pick me up from outside the travel agents at half past ten and the woman who sold me the ticket told me not to panic if it was late as there were pick-ups all along the road and sometimes the bus took longer to arrive than at others.

For want of anything better to do I decided to go to the British Council Library with two intentions in mind; firstly to cool off and do some reading, and secondly to be close to what I assumed would be a clean toilet should the need arise. On my way to the library I almost trod on a snake; one of the small green pit vipers such as I had seen at the Snake Temple yesterday. It was the first time I had ever seen a snake in the wild - not that you could call the streets of George Town wild - and it gave me quite a start. Upon arrival at the British Council Library I was to be disappointed on both fronts; I could see no sign of any toilets at all and the air-conditioning was so fierce that my arms immediately broke out in goose pimples. I left again straight away, but fared no better at the Penang Library. The one men’s toilet that was open was of the squat variety, not particularly clean, had no lock on the cubicle and nowhere to hang my bag.

In frustration I returned outside to look for a shady bench in the park beside the Esplanade and Fort Cornwallis. They were all occupied and so I had to sit in the sun. After a few minutes I was joined by one of the locals, who turned out to be a trishaw driver looking for a customer for his guided tour of George Town. When I told him I’d seen everything that I wanted to see (almost true) he left.

In another few minutes I spotted a large group of young people armed with cameras and telephoto lenses taking pictures of virtually everything that appeared in their viewfinders. At first I had taken them for a bunch of Japanese tourists, but I gradually became aware that many of them were photographing me - very strange! At last one of the girls amongst the group plucked up the courage to come over. Excuse me, sir, I hope you don’t mind if we take your picture? It’s a little too late to be asking me this I thought. Feel free. It makes a change for people to photograph me, rather than for me to photograph others. Where are you from? We’re from a school, she responded. A local school? I asked. Yes, here in Penang, she answered. So, you’ve got a school project to go out and photograph tourists then, I enquired. She simply smiled, said thank you and walked off to rejoin her colleagues, all of whom had naturally been feverishly clicking away throughout the course of our short conversation. The students continued to click away from all angles, taking pictures of me reading, crossing and uncrossing my legs, taking something out of my daypack, removing my cap to wipe the perspiration from my brow, putting my cap back on again; the opportunities were endless! After about ten minutes they must have covered me from every conceivable angle and they moved off en masse, presumably in search of new subject matter. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when their teacher appraised their efforts! After another short while exposed to the heat of the midday sun I began to feel all hot and bothered and I returned to the hotel for a siesta. On the way I bought two cans of carbonated drinks, a litre bottle of water and a pint of Guinness. I still could not face food and felt that the latter would serve as a substitute. I arrived back not a moment too soon, only just making it to the bathroom in time to avoid a very messy accident. Back in my room I opened both cans of pop and left them to stand, then spent the next three hours in my room, reading and drinking; firstly the Guinness and then a fifty-fifty mixture of water and the now flat pop. By half past three I felt sufficiently better to be able to venture outside once more.

My first stop was the Malay mosque. It was certainly nothing to write home about; all I could see was a rather shabby courtyard and an Egyptian style minaret. Next up was Khoo Kongsi, the clan house of the Khoo family. It is supposedly by far the best example of a kongsi in George Town, which to my mind didn’t say much for the others. Next stop on my agenda was the Kapitan Kling Mosque, an attractive edifice heavily influenced by Indian Islamic architecture and art.

I then returned to the Kuan Yin Teng temple that I had visited on Monday and had a much better look round, concentrating more on the activities of the worshippers than the buildings. Incense sticks were for sale within the temple and appeared to be available in three sizes. The large ones were about the size and colour of breadsticks; the enormous ones were the same colour but thicker and about two feet long; whilst the gigantic ones were bright purple in colour, about as thick as a man’s arm and almost as tall as the average Chinese worshippers buying them in exchange for fistfuls of ringgit, the correct name for the Malaysian dollar. Other votive offerings available included great wads of what I termed Monopoly money, burnt in the same way that the Bank of England must dispose of its old bank notes, and cooking oil. The huge drums of cooking oil that can be seen all over Asia were stacked up in a corner, and from these were filled glass bottles of all shapes and sizes, including Carlsberg Special Brew bottles with their labels still intact. The bottles were used to pour oil into large vats in which small wick-like things floated, thereby slowly burning the oil contained within. Not surprisingly, the volume of smoke generated by the burning of paper money, cooking oil and joss sticks was something akin to a Victorian London pea-souper. No wonder the timbers of the roof beams were as black as the ace of spades.

My short spell of sightseeing at and end for the day I returned once more to the hotel for a nap. At seven o’clock I showered then ventured out again for a meal. It was a beautiful evening with a lovely pink glow to the twilight skies. Tonight I decided to play it safe and go to McDonald’s in the Komtar Centre, where I had a double cheeseburger, a chicken sandwich and the thickest milk shake in the recorded history of mankind. The effort required to suck the shake up through the straw must have been the equivalent of a thirty minute workout at the gym! Afterwards I wandered around the book store for a while. One young lad was avidly reading a chapter about sexual intercourse in a medical text book, whilst computer software manuals also appeared very popular. The best bargain of the entire store had to be a paperback edition of the complete works of Shakespeare for just M$14.90. I was very tempted but I just would not have room for it in my bags.

On the way back to the hotel I saw my first Chinese funeral, being conducted in the shop-front of a 24-hour photo developing store. The interior of the store was decked out like a shrine, with a photograph of the deceased (owner or franchise holder?) prominently displayed. Outside, before a makeshift altar, a saffron-robed Buddhist monk and three black-clad women, who I assumed were nuns, were all chanting and one of the women was also beating on a small drum. On the pavement were gathered between fifteen and twenty mourners dressed in white, the traditional colour of mourning in Asia, sitting cross-legged on the ground and also chanting.

Continuing on I called in at another bookshop and bought a copy of the latest Eric van Lustbader novel, Angel Eyes, which I had passed over at Heathrow because I already had a novel to read, and at Hong Kong because of the prohibitive price. As an aside I had been struck this evening by the beauty of the pure-bred Malay women, with their wonderful round faces and incredible café-au-lait complexions, many of whom I had seen out on the streets tonight during the course of my perambulations.

Back in my hotel room by nine-fifteen, I wrote my diary and then read until midnight. I concluded that A Dream of Red Mansions really is an excellent story that I had thoroughly enjoyed reading, even if many of the subtle nuances and inner meanings had gone way over my head as an ignorant gwailoh.

Description
I inadvertently used the only photograph I took on this day for Day 30, so this is one of the Masjid Negeri, the Penang State Mosque, from tomorrow.

Day 34 - Friday 28 February

George Town

After being woken at two o’clock by the couple in the room next door returning - I thought the place was supposed to lock up at midnight - I slept soundly until eight o’clock, when once again woken by my neighbours. This time they were having an argument. I had previously thought that they were both German, so wondered why the argument, about the girl’s hair, took place in English. Maybe one of them was Scandinavian? Or perhaps they were simply practising their English! I didn’t get up until nearly ten o’clock and my guts still felt decidedly dodgy.

After breakfasting as usual at the Tye Ann Hotel I wandered along Lebuh Chulia to find somewhere to book a bus ticket for Tapah. My first choice, despite the Open sign on the door, was firmly locked and I continued on until arriving at Silver-Econ Travel. There were no problems about getting a seat for Sunday, although my preferred departure time of a quarter past eight was already fully booked and I had to settle for the ten-fifteen service. I thought this would probably mean I had greater difficulty in finding a bed when I arrived in Tanah Rata. The bus would pick me up from outside the travel agents at half past ten and the woman who sold me the ticket told me not to panic if it was late as there were pick-ups all along the road and sometimes the bus took longer to arrive than at others.

For want of anything better to do I decided to go to the British Council Library with two intentions in mind; firstly to cool off and do some reading, and secondly to be close to what I assumed would be a clean toilet should the need arise. On my way to the library I almost trod on a snake; one of the small green pit vipers such as I had seen at the Snake Temple yesterday. It was the first time I had ever seen a snake in the wild - not that you could call the streets of George Town wild - and it gave me quite a start. Upon arrival at the British Council Library I was to be disappointed on both fronts; I could see no sign of any toilets at all and the air-conditioning was so fierce that my arms immediately broke out in goose pimples. I left again straight away, but fared no better at the Penang Library. The one men’s toilet that was open was of the squat variety, not particularly clean, had no lock on the cubicle and nowhere to hang my bag.

In frustration I returned outside to look for a shady bench in the park beside the Esplanade and Fort Cornwallis. They were all occupied and so I had to sit in the sun. After a few minutes I was joined by one of the locals, who turned out to be a trishaw driver looking for a customer for his guided tour of George Town. When I told him I’d seen everything that I wanted to see (almost true) he left.

In another few minutes I spotted a large group of young people armed with cameras and telephoto lenses taking pictures of virtually everything that appeared in their viewfinders. At first I had taken them for a bunch of Japanese tourists, but I gradually became aware that many of them were photographing me - very strange! At last one of the girls amongst the group plucked up the courage to come over. Excuse me, sir, I hope you don’t mind if we take your picture? It’s a little too late to be asking me this I thought. Feel free. It makes a change for people to photograph me, rather than for me to photograph others. Where are you from? We’re from a school, she responded. A local school? I asked. Yes, here in Penang, she answered. So, you’ve got a school project to go out and photograph tourists then, I enquired. She simply smiled, said thank you and walked off to rejoin her colleagues, all of whom had naturally been feverishly clicking away throughout the course of our short conversation. The students continued to click away from all angles, taking pictures of me reading, crossing and uncrossing my legs, taking something out of my daypack, removing my cap to wipe the perspiration from my brow, putting my cap back on again; the opportunities were endless! After about ten minutes they must have covered me from every conceivable angle and they moved off en masse, presumably in search of new subject matter. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when their teacher appraised their efforts! After another short while exposed to the heat of the midday sun I began to feel all hot and bothered and I returned to the hotel for a siesta. On the way I bought two cans of carbonated drinks, a litre bottle of water and a pint of Guinness. I still could not face food and felt that the latter would serve as a substitute. I arrived back not a moment too soon, only just making it to the bathroom in time to avoid a very messy accident. Back in my room I opened both cans of pop and left them to stand, then spent the next three hours in my room, reading and drinking; firstly the Guinness and then a fifty-fifty mixture of water and the now flat pop. By half past three I felt sufficiently better to be able to venture outside once more.

My first stop was the Malay mosque. It was certainly nothing to write home about; all I could see was a rather shabby courtyard and an Egyptian style minaret. Next up was Khoo Kongsi, the clan house of the Khoo family. It is supposedly by far the best example of a kongsi in George Town, which to my mind didn’t say much for the others. Next stop on my agenda was the Kapitan Kling Mosque, an attractive edifice heavily influenced by Indian Islamic architecture and art.

I then returned to the Kuan Yin Teng temple that I had visited on Monday and had a much better look round, concentrating more on the activities of the worshippers than the buildings. Incense sticks were for sale within the temple and appeared to be available in three sizes. The large ones were about the size and colour of breadsticks; the enormous ones were the same colour but thicker and about two feet long; whilst the gigantic ones were bright purple in colour, about as thick as a man’s arm and almost as tall as the average Chinese worshippers buying them in exchange for fistfuls of ringgit, the correct name for the Malaysian dollar. Other votive offerings available included great wads of what I termed Monopoly money, burnt in the same way that the Bank of England must dispose of its old bank notes, and cooking oil. The huge drums of cooking oil that can be seen all over Asia were stacked up in a corner, and from these were filled glass bottles of all shapes and sizes, including Carlsberg Special Brew bottles with their labels still intact. The bottles were used to pour oil into large vats in which small wick-like things floated, thereby slowly burning the oil contained within. Not surprisingly, the volume of smoke generated by the burning of paper money, cooking oil and joss sticks was something akin to a Victorian London pea-souper. No wonder the timbers of the roof beams were as black as the ace of spades.

My short spell of sightseeing at and end for the day I returned once more to the hotel for a nap. At seven o’clock I showered then ventured out again for a meal. It was a beautiful evening with a lovely pink glow to the twilight skies. Tonight I decided to play it safe and go to McDonald’s in the Komtar Centre, where I had a double cheeseburger, a chicken sandwich and the thickest milk shake in the recorded history of mankind. The effort required to suck the shake up through the straw must have been the equivalent of a thirty minute workout at the gym! Afterwards I wandered around the book store for a while. One young lad was avidly reading a chapter about sexual intercourse in a medical text book, whilst computer software manuals also appeared very popular. The best bargain of the entire store had to be a paperback edition of the complete works of Shakespeare for just M$14.90. I was very tempted but I just would not have room for it in my bags.

On the way back to the hotel I saw my first Chinese funeral, being conducted in the shop-front of a 24-hour photo developing store. The interior of the store was decked out like a shrine, with a photograph of the deceased (owner or franchise holder?) prominently displayed. Outside, before a makeshift altar, a saffron-robed Buddhist monk and three black-clad women, who I assumed were nuns, were all chanting and one of the women was also beating on a small drum. On the pavement were gathered between fifteen and twenty mourners dressed in white, the traditional colour of mourning in Asia, sitting cross-legged on the ground and also chanting.

Continuing on I called in at another bookshop and bought a copy of the latest Eric van Lustbader novel, Angel Eyes, which I had passed over at Heathrow because I already had a novel to read, and at Hong Kong because of the prohibitive price. As an aside I had been struck this evening by the beauty of the pure-bred Malay women, with their wonderful round faces and incredible café-au-lait complexions, many of whom I had seen out on the streets tonight during the course of my perambulations.

Back in my hotel room by nine-fifteen, I wrote my diary and then read until midnight. I concluded that A Dream of Red Mansions really is an excellent story that I had thoroughly enjoyed reading, even if many of the subtle nuances and inner meanings had gone way over my head as an ignorant gwailoh.