Hey Hive!
So if you missed last week's post, I started sharing about our short getaway to Penang Island, Malaysia, which we went on in July 2022! It was our first trip post-covid and since we weren't sure about the covid climate yet (and how effective our vaccines were), we decided to take a short 3 day trip there!
Last week, we started our journey at Changi Airport and while waiting for our flight we had our first experience at an airport lounge and got a free lunch there!
After nearly missing our flight, we arrived in Penang Island and took a ride to our hotel - the Wembley and since we had some time we decided to go sightsee, so let's go!
24 July 2022. Sunday.
It was around 5pm but it was still pretty bright out so we decided to go take a walk around the hotel since we were right in the middle of George Town, which is the colorful, multicultural capital of Penang! Once an important Malacca trading hub, the city is known for its British colonial buildings, Chinese shophouses and mosques.
But locally, it is well known for plenty of food; especially street food! There are apparently many famous stalls here specialising in their own unique dishes.
We took a walk around the neighbourhood near our hotel and we could already feel the heat. Thankfully the sun was nearly setting but it was still blisteringly hot compared to Singapore. I think it's mostly likely due to all the cars and asphalt absorbing the heat, and probably less greenery too.
Sean had never been here before but he felt like he recognised some places like this dark bus interchange. It felt like being transported back in time to when we were kids.
We walked through some very typical Malaysian architecture with these old shophouses and narrow pathways. It was a surprise when we passed by some newer shops and cafes which looked more modern, but the tiles had a traditional look to them.
One think I'll say is the traffic lights here can have ridiculous waiting times. The big pedestrian crossings have numbers to indicate how long you have to wait and the maximum is 99 seconds!
We didn't really have a destination in mind other than looking for the area with lots of street food so we just took a stroll.
We walked under this very colourful old building with more shops that were unfortunately closed. But it did remind us of old shopping centres in Singapore.
At least the floor here was reasonably clean and even to walk on. It's only when we visit other countries do we take that for granted in Singapore.
The traffic can be pretty packed even on this little island, and there's not many convenient pedestrian crossings so it can be hard to navigate safely.
Just seeing all these old shophouses takes me back to when my family used to visit Malaysia every year. Those road trips in the car were fun while they lasted.
We ended up walking down a few deserted alleyways and wondered how hard this place was hit because of covid since this whole area used to be a hot tourist spot.
I tried to take some artistic shots among the shophouses.
After walking for a while we finally arrived to some places with food stalls! some of them were closed but we were in the right street I think.
We ended up in this random alley where there were a couple of street carts selling snacks and desserts. We saw this cendol/chendul stall and since it was so warm we decided to buy one bowl to cool ourselves down.
If you're unfamiliar, cendol is a shaved ice dessert with green rice flour jelly, coconut milk, red beans all topped with palm sugar syrup and is commonly found in Southeast Asia.
Source: Danielfooddiary
We're not super big fans of cendol so we've never bought in Singapore but we're familiar with the concept. What we didn't know at the time was that this was apparently a super famous cendol stall!
For 4.40RM we got quite a decent-sized bowl but unfortunately it was so hot that most of the shaved ice was quite melted so it ended up being more like a cold dessert soup with coconut milk and palm sugar syrup. So it was quite sweet and had plenty of the green jelly to sort of counter it since the rice flour jelly doesn't have much taste.
Overall though it was still quite a nice dessert and thankfully there wasn't a queue when we arrived. But I have seen footage of people queuing for this dessert in the hot sun and after tasting it I'd say it's a little overrated. Then again I'm not a big cendol fan so.
We asked the stall owner if she knew of some places we could go to get more food and she directed us down the street to a place called Kimberly Road, so we decided to take a walk there. This street also had a few more stalls and restaurants but they weren't open yet sadly. The lights made this place more welcoming though.
We even found this Harry Potter themed cafe but they seemed to be selling mostly Western food and other desserts and since we weren't in the mood for either we walked past it. I think it would've been cool to check it out though and am sad we kinda forgot about it.
We did see a Mexican place that had tacos but it was closed too unfortunately.
We knew there was a famous mural street in George Town since this was supposed to be an artsy, cultural place too and we found one of them! It was a pretty sweet mural of a couple on a bicycle and although some of the colour came off (I assume) it still looked pretty good.
There was also some other street art but I'm not sure if this qualifies as art of graffiti. Either way it's something you wouldn't see in Singapore since it's illegal, sadly. I feel like Singapore needs more street art like this, although maybe just sanctioned ones since people might draw NSFW stuff.
This mural looked pretty interesting though and I thought those were spiders at first until I realised they're lanterns.
We saw a few more people walking along this street and I think we were getting close to Kimberly Road.
Finally we across this pretty huge hawker centre! It was definitely the old-school style of hawker centre that I imagine those in Singapore used to look like since they basically housed the streetcart stalls in this makeshift shelter.
There were two aisled to it, first had this dimsum stall and rojak stall with a bunch of tables in the back.
The second aisle was the main area with this kway teow stall in the front and a bunch of other stalls lining the walls with chairs and tables in the middle.
But apart from this hawker centre there were a bunch of other streetcart stalls as well! There were tables and chairs setup on the sides of the road for people to sit and eat too, it was as traditional as it gets!
This whole street was basically the food street and there were so many stalls here! I bet some of these are famous stalls as well, which explains how they're still here post-covid. We saw many motorcyclists just driving up to the stalls and buying the food to-go, driving off once they got their order.
We were kinda spoilt for choice on what to eat here, and the redolence of barbecued and charcoal smells was overwhelming and making us so hungry!
We decided to go back to the first hawker centre we saw and see what kind of food they had there since there were more seats there and it was safer than eating by the side of the road. I was kinda self-conscious of the traffic since everyone was just jaywalking and there didn't seem to be dedicated lanes.
Thankfully the hawker centre was still quite empty so we didn't have trouble getting seats. It was pretty warm in here though so we sat close to the entrance in the hopes of catching some breeze.
There were ceiling fans on the inside but it seemed to just be blowing the hot air internally so I wasn't sure how effective they were.
We saw this stall selling claypot chicken rice and since it's one of my favourite dishes, we decided to try it!
While we waited for that Sean also ordered char kway teow (which is a stir-fried flat noodle dish with seafood, chinese sausage and vegetables) from a stall just opposite this one.
We knew Penang was famous for its duck egg char kway teow and wanted to try it but unfortunately it was sold out at the time! So we settled for a normal chicken egg char kway teow. To be fair it was still really yummy! It had that charcoal taste to it and had quite some spice but not overly spicy.
It was definitely quite oily and unhealthy but it tasted soo good!! Everything was nicely seasoned and the prawns were quite big and juicy, while the beansprouts were crunchy.
After about 10 minutes our claypot chicken rice arrived! I believe this one might have duck egg in it but I don't really rmb.
It was definitely quite hot in the claypot so I waited a bit before trying it and it was pretty good! I wouldn't say it's spectacular but it was yummy, maybe just lacking in a bit more sauce but it had the right idea. The egg did look a little raw so I mixed it in and tried to cook it on the bottom of the claypot and it worked a little! So it was sort of like eating claypot fried rice!
It was so warm and eating these hot dishes didn't help so we ended up buying 2 drinks to cool ourselves down. It helped a little but after we finished eating we quickly left since it was getting even warmer with the dinner crowd coming in.
It was dark by the time we left and it was definitely more bustling now since it was prime dinner time.
We wanted to get dessert but also wanted to leave this warm area for now and we passed by this muah chee seller and Sean decided to try it!
Muah Chee is sticky, chewy glutinous rice balls tossed in a coating of crushed peanuts and sweet sugar. It's the lesser known cousin to Japanese mochi and is fairly common in Malaysia and Singapore.
This streetcart man sells Muah Chee straight out the back of his motorcycle! It was a small and humble stall so we decide to support him. He prepared it right in front of us and we saw him scoop a generous amount of crushed peanuts for us!
He also had different flavours so we tried the Pandan one and it actually looked and smelled pretty legit! We could smell the pandan even under all the crushed peanut.
The muah chee was surprisingly warm and had a nice soft and bouncy texture! I'm not normally a fan of muah chee because I find it too sticky but this one was just right. You could tell it was handmade too since the shapes were irregular and the texture felt hand kneaded. Overall it was a very pleasant surprise how good it was!
We took a walk to enjoy the night air while eating the muah chee and we came across this shophouse that was actually a bubble tea shop!
I thought it was a Chinese medicine place or a temple of sorts but on looking closely it was in fact a boba shop and apparently it was a pretty famous chain according to Sean.
But I think that's gonna be all for today! There's still a lot more to this day so I'll continue next week! Sorry for the false teaser last time but we'll get to that temple eventually! Here's a real teaser:
Tune in next week for more of our adventures in Penang Island! Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Check out my previous post in this series!
TacoCat’s Travels #198 (Penang): Lounging around before our island Getaway! 🛫
