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After the rushing around in the morning we made it to the ferry and boarded for our trip to Penang. The film selection was bang on again for kev, playing one of his favourite films Ip man followed by Ip Man 2. Arriving in Penang we hit the wall of taxi drivers trying to get our business. One tried to rip us off by charging 20RM to go 5 mins in a old sierra with no signs or lights or anything claiming he was a real taxi driver who needed to feed his family. We declined as we had seen the beginning of horror movies and knew that even if we did get out its not very likely to be at our original guesthouse. In the end we opted for just ringing the guesthouse. Turned out we were only 10 minutes away so we walked through Georgetown to our new home for the next 5 days. We booked into the Old Penang which was situated on love lane, interesting fact that this road used to be brothel central for the seedy British Empire in the 1800's. Now its mostly cheapy guesthouses, bars, and shops although you don't have to go far to find by the hour company. Our nice room was right at the back away from the dorms but outside in the street was a carpenter shop who loved starting work at 5am. He had a few dogs that kept us from being alone at night as they enjoyed barking till the early hours. With Penang being the food capital of Malaysia we found our way to one of the many night markets, the closest one was the Red Garden which was an open top food court surrounded by different vendors offering a wide selection of mostly Malaysian foods. After browsing the stalls like a 50 old woman in a charity shop we went for the BBQ chicken rice and pork noodles. Once we had consumed our fill we retired for the night planning the next days activities. DANGER WILL ROBINSON! - 3am and i wakes up with stomach cramps here we go round 2 with food poisoning. Lorna left me to recover the next morning and she went to explore the area around. Georgetown is predominately small intersecting streets with little shops with anything from watch and motorbike repairs to overly decorated cakes, quaint cafes, and as expected hundreds of street side carts making yummy noodles, rice packages and sweet pancakes with the occasional temple or historic house peaking through making it easy to see most of the town by simply wandering through all the alleys.The temples and mosques are still in full use and not just tourist attractions and you can see on every house there is a small shrine used by that family who live there to give thanks to their deity every morning One major problem Georgetown has is the never ending stream of cars and motorbikes using every available inch of road or even pavement making paying attention to your surroundings essential. Something else hard to miss was the disregard towards littering everyone just threw rubbish on the street or in the open drains, which by the way gave off a very unpleasant smell especially at the hottest parts of the day! Due to kev's unfortunate condition we were pretty limited to exploring the nearby area for short periods of time. Thankfully we were relatively central we at least did get most of the sights photographed. As it was we are here over New Year we looked into what was going on in Georgetown, we had the option of a shopping mall having a fireworks display but on our travels round town we saw a stage being erected in the park bordering the harbour. A bit of noisiness discovered a free new years concert was starting there in the afternoon and ran all the way to 2am. Starting with a dance off, mostly teens with not entirely age appropriate dance moves and some older 'britians got talent' style groups, was quite funny for an hour or so. Unfortunately in true bad luck fashion, once its started it may as well carry on, the remaining evening including music was pretty bad. I will remember one of Malaysians answer to Glee singing Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You, pretty badly (except for the words she didn't know and made up that was quite funny) for a very long time along with the terrible food and more cringe worthy music. Eventually we surrendered and gave in to the tried and tested rum and a cheesy film, Ace Ventura in this case, tempting a few other people over to the darkide and stumbling to bed at 4am ish. New Years day. Trying as hard as possible not to think of how everyone else's day will be going (roast potatoes, yorkshire puddings, gravey...) our best option was Subway. This may not sound exciting but after weeks of noodle soup and rice for all meals a meatball sandwich whilst hungover was amazing! With only one day left we were determined to find some of this 'incredible food' everyone had been talking about, best we managed was to find some yummy pork noodles at the stalls at the end of our road. The elderly lady in charge of cooking was extremely focused making each bowl of yummyness one at a time with her helper finishing it off either as either soup or dry. So this is pretty much how we spent the last day in Penang. We both found Penang hard to write. I had such high hopes especially for the food, reading other peoples experience and how they love it. Maybe with Kev not being 100% or it being over over new year we felt a little disappointed. However we are bound for Thailand at last so things can only get better!
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