Bangkok without the smell and the overwhelming bustle and the street vendors and the prostitutes. We found ourselves here as the result of needing to renew our temporary visas. Quite a painless process really. The only snag we encountered was arriving on a Saturday and therefore having to stay an extra day due to the fact that no one works on a Sunday. Global day of rest. Am slightly surprised that a two-month so-called "tourist visa" is so easy to aquire, but I'm not complaining! Georgetown is a very interesting place, the inner (or old) city being a UNESCO World Heritage site. It was founded in 1786 by Captain Francis Light, a trader for the British East India Company, as base for the company in the Malay States. He obtained the island of Penang from the Sultan of Kedah for this purpose. As a result of it's interesting history (which I won't delve into too much), Georgetown has a unique architectural and cultural townscape without parallel anywhere in East and Southeast Asia, one that I would decribe as 'crumbling colonial'. Very beautiful. The demography is also quite interesting. I was expecting the majority of the people there to be Malay and Muslim, but it turns out that Penang's population of ethnic Chinese is larger than the Malay population, whilst 10% of the demography is occupied by ethinc Indian people. All this cultural-mixing results in really amazing food!
Summary of my Malaysian experience: hairless dogs; taxi-drivers named Alex with a good grasp of English and a humorous inclination towards extended metaphors; grungy hotels full of amazing photo opportunities and ghosts, chipped folding card tables, red plastic chairs and faded posters; incredible Indian cuisine and 10%vol. beer; 'Little India', full of music and colour and pretty little bindi's and roadside stalls selling delicious samoosas; snake temples and five venomous vipers; 12%vol. beer. And then a long bus-ride back to Hatyai.
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