Day 28-29 – A Very Different Georgetown
I’ve been to Georgetown many times. My sister went there for
college. I went there to visit her (and help her move in and out her first two
years). I went to Georgetown again, but this was a very different Georgetown.
This Georgetown was very, very far away from the hill in Washington DC, but
still quite fun. Batu Ferringghi (our last stop) was only 30 minutes away from
the central part of Georgetown, the main city on Penang Island. Georgetown was
an old Portuguese and then English colony in Malaysia, and it still holds those
influences, especially the British Colonial architecture.
We reached our hotel around 12:00, the Bayview Georgetown, a
famous old hotel in the area that is still undergoing renovations to make it
more appealing to customers in the 21st Century. The hotel is
located near the old part of Georgetown, which contains most of the sites to
see in the city, but also contains the poorer, older section of the city.
Penang is also known for its great food, mostly Nyonya infused Malaysian Food,
as well as its famous night market hawker centres. We decided to split our four
main meals in Georgetown between two hawker centres and two Nyonya-style
restaurants. For our first meal, we went to the New World Hawker Centre,
located in central Georgetown. It was very reminiscent of the main Hawker
Centres in Singapore, including the fact that it was only open during the day.
The Hawker fare was mostly lunch style food (noodles, flat noodles, fried rice,
roti canai – you know, lunch food). This was a little sad because we aren’t
really into that style of food other than a few select dishes (Roti Canai, Chow
Kuey Teow), but the food was still quite good. Also, like most Hawker Centres,
the alcohol was relatively cheap.
After lunch, we headed back to the hotel to relax for a bit,
as my Mom was quite tired (mostly after her morning walk on the beach at Batu
Ferringghi), and the Georgetown heat was bearing down on us full-bore. After a
couple hours, when the air was cooling and the temperature dropped a good 10
degrees, we headed back out for a little walking tour of Georgetown. We passed
some sites close to the hotel that were good photo opportunities: the high
court and parliament of Georgetown – a large building built in an almost
Mediterranean style; The St. George’s Church, a small but beautiful white
Anglican church, the Masjid Kapitan Keling, a large sprawling mosque, and the
entrance to the Khong See, a hidden Chinese temple tucked inside a busy block
of road. The walk there and back took a good hour and a half, and while we were
both quite drained by the end of it (you can’t escape the humidity forever), it
was quite a nice introduction to Georgetown’s history.
Our place for dinner was Mama’s Nyonya Café, a small
mom-and-pop restaurant located more in the modern center of Georgetown. We
easily got a cab there as there is a cab stand outside the hotel. The
restaurant was hard to find as the cab driver didn’t really know where it was
(something that happens far too often with cab drivers in Malaysia). I can’t blame
the driver because the restaurant is hard to find, with a small sign outside is
tiny place on the block. The restaurant itself was small, with just five
tables, but filled with large families eating what looked to be delicious food.
Their menu was very familiar to my Mom and myself, having seen similar dishes
at Nyonya in NYC too many times to count. Wanting to go in a slightly different
direction, we ordered Wild Boar Rendang, instead of beef. We also ordered Chicken
Kopitam, another Nyonya staple, and Assam Fish. All three dishes had excellent
curries at their base, with distinct flavors. I usually don’t like chicken, but
the slightly lemongrass-infused chicken curry was my favorite dish of the
night. The Wild Boar Rendang was a little tough (wild boar generally is), but
the curry was as close to the Rendang we love so much back home. The portions
weren’t big, but then the low prices made the price to portion size ratio more
than acceptable.
When we left Mama Nyonya, a restaurant that my Mom
researched and wanted to go to from the time we started planning our days in
Penang, we had to find a cab back to the Bayview. This isn’t usually a
difficult exercise, but in Penang, hailing a cab is a precarious idea,
especially at night. There are cabs in Georgetown. I know because I have taken
a ride in one of them. But in trying to find a cab to get us back to the hotel,
I doubted my past experiences. There are just no cabs available at night in
Georgetown, none. For a city that is one of the biggest in Malaysia (not to
mention the island of Penang being the 2nd biggest tourist
destination), I find it baffling to see the abject lack of cabs in the city. We
finally got one by walking to the main road, and accepting his inflated price
to take us back (most cabs won’t go by meter), and we reached back to the
hotel.
My Mom was quite tired, but since it was only about 10:00, I
was definitely not, and decided to scout out our dinner spot for the next
night, the Red Garden Hawker Center, located just two blocks away from the
hotel. The Red Garden is unlike any Hawker Center I have been to. It shares
similarities to the Long Beach Café in Batu Ferringghi, as it is a large
expanse of tables inside four walls of stalls. However, this is a larger area,
with a more decorative, party feel. The real difference, though, is it is
really a trendy night spot at night, with a stage and live music each night.
The whole experience was wonderful. My plan was to sit with a roti canai and a
beer, but they didn’t have a roti canai stand. Instead, I got Octopus with
Special Sauce from East Coast Seafood, a seafood stand that is a staple in any
respected night Hawker Center. The music was good, the beer was good, the food
was great. The whole package was excellent, a great way to spend a night in Georgetown.
Most restaurants in Georgetown close early (Mama Nyonya closed at 10:00, on a
Friday night), but the Red Garden closes well after midnight (when I left). It
actually got more crowded as the night wore on. Just a fantastic setting.
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The next day in Penang marked many different occasions. Not
only was it Palm Sunday, but it marked the 1-month anniversary of my trip
beginning. Four weeks of travel, of continents and airlines, of passport stamps
and languages, of cabs and meats, of ocean breezes and blistering heat.
Finally, it marked the last day of true sightseeing until I leave for Jaipur in
India on the 7th of April. To commemorate all these different occasions,
we arranged quite a hectic schedule of sites and meals to do on our last day.
We had two times set in stone, mass at 6:00 and the tour of the Cheong Fat Tze
palace at 11:00.
We had two different places to see before the tour of the
Cheong Fat Tze palace. Both are walking distance from the hotel, but because we
got started a little late (9:45), we first took a cab to the Khoo Kongsee, a
Chinese temple off of the road that we walked through the previous evening. The
Khoo Kongsee is one main building in the center of an open square. Because of
the shortage of time, we didn’t take much time to really find out what the
significance of the Khoo Kongsee was, but went into the main building. The
temple is exquisitely ornate, with beautiful work on the columns and ceiling
outside. The inside of the temple was pretty much the same. The cost of going
there is pretty trivial, and it didn’t need much time to see all of it, but it
really is a nice gem deep inside Old Georgetown.
The next stop was the Perikan Mansion, an old large house
(or, I guess, mansion) built back in the early 1900’s, still designed and
arranged in that old style. The building includes a jewelry museum that
includes many other ornate, delicate pieces (crowns, clothing) that are as rich
as the jewelry there. The mansion itself was decorated nicely, and gave a good
glimpse into the deep Colonial English influence in style and architecture of
Georgetown. The house is large, and we hurriedly did as much of it as we could
in the limited time we had and after a nice sprint to the Cheong Fat Tze, we
reached just as the tour was starting.
The Cheong Fat Tze Mansion is one of the more famous sites
in Georgetown. Today, it is run as a guesthouse that anyone can stay at, but
its previous life was the main mansion in Penang for Cheong Fat Tze, a Chinese
born businessman named the “Rockefeller of the East” by the Rockefeller’s
themselves. Because it is a running guesthouse, the only way to see it outside
of staying there is to go for one of their two guided tours at 11:00 or 3:30.
The tour group was quite large, and the tour guide was quite good. She spoke
great English and was a really good guide, telling nice, humorous stories,
keeping us really engaged during the entire one hour tour. The house was
extremely well restored, as it was apparently bought in 1989 in tatters after
it was abandoned by Cheong Fat Tze’s last son (he had 8 wives in 8 countries).
Now the house is supposedly back to what it was during Cheong Fat Tze’s time
(of course there is now running water and air conditioning). The main highlight
of the house is a series of panels on the top floor built in an old Chinese
style of cutting up colored bowls and using the shards to glue together
beautiful depictions. When you realize what they are up close, it is quite
stunning, as is most of the house in general.
After we finished the tour we headed back to the hotel,
located conveniently across the street from the Cheong Fat Tze, we took a little
siesta, escaping the overbearing Penang heat at its worst. We came back out
near 1:30 to go for lunch to Ivy’s Nyonya Café, another small mom-and-pop
Nyonya jointrated #2 on TripAdvisor in Penang. Their lunch menu comes in a set
menu or a select series of small dishes or ‘side dishes’ (essentially smaller
real dishes) of traditional Nyonya food. We ordered about four of these smaller
dishes and they were all quite good. The Beef Rendang was extremely spicy which
kind of ruined the otherwise tasty curry and meat. The fish and prawns were
well made, as was the chicken kopitam, quickly becoming one of my favorite Nyonya
dishes. After another long search for a cab, we finally got one and were on our
way to our final spot, the final tourist destination of Part I of my trip, the
Kok Lek Si Temple, at the base of Penang Hill.
The drive up to the base of the temple was reminiscent of
the drive up to the base of Table Mountain. The view from the bottom was
somewhat similar (though Cape Town is just more aesthetically perfect than
Penang, or any other city). The temple itself is a large series of connected
buildings slotted along the façade of the hill. The bottom parts of the temple
grounds were just larger versions of the Khoo Kongsee temple. The real treat is
what it at the top of the temple ground. Accessible by stairs or by ‘slanted
elevator’ (a funicular), the top temple is houses a giant statue of some god
inside a coliseum like building with tall columns. It is quite a spectacular
building from afar, and almost as good from up close. Penang Hill houses many
different sites (mostly nature related), and the Kek Lok Si temple is the only
one we chose to see, and I think we chose the best one.
We reached back at the hotel rather and took a quick nap
before leaving for mass. The mass itself was eventful mainly because of its
length. With the inclusion of the Passion as the gospel for Palm Sunday, the
mass is generally longer than a normal one, but despite this priest not saying
a sermon, the mass still took an hour and a half. That really isn’t fair given
the heat. At least by the time we escaped the clutches of that rambling mass it
was dark and cooler. Penang gets quite nice after dark in terms of the weather.
We headed back to the hotel for a quick shower and rest before we left for our
final meal in Southeast Asia.
Because of my great experience the previous night and my Mom’s
regret for not coming, we decided to go back to the Red Garden for dinner. We
arrived around nine, and while the place was still full, it was noticeably less
full than it was near midnight the night before. Now, at first I chalked that
up to today being a Sunday versus yesterday being a Saturday, but as I soon
figured out that the real reason was because the Red Garden is just a better
spot the later it gets. The music gets better, the crowd gets better, the
drink-to-food ratio gets higher. Anyway, we ordered House Special Clams and
blackened mackerel. The mackerel was fried nicely, with a light BBQ sauce, but
it didn’t hold a candle to the clams, which were excellent. I shared a bottle
of Asahi with my Mom (and by bottle, I mean I had 4/5ths of it), and not before
long the music started. It was everything the previous night was, but now with
more food. After we finished that course, we went back to get more clams (they
were that good), and I ordered lamb satay. Now, I was a little skeptical of the
lam satay because such combinations always sound better coming out of your
mouth than they taste coming in, but damn was that lamb satay excellent. The
lamb by itself was extremely well cooked, so much so that I didn’t even want to
put the peanut sauce by the end of it. The night ended with a smaller bottle of
Tiger, and some regrets about not ordering another lamb satay. Lambs are so
cute, but when I eat something like that, I could care less because it is so
damn good.
