Hey Hive!
If you missed the last few posts, I started sharing about our short getaway to Penang Island, Malaysia, back in July 2022! It was our first trip post-covid and we decided to go on a short 3 day getaway there! It had been at least a decade since either of us have visited Penang so this was a semi-new experience for both of us.
Last week, we had a taste of some authentic Penang street food where we ate some delicious dishes by the roadside of Chulia Street!
We ended up eating some very yummy dishes including our favourite one of this trip - wanton noodles from this streetcart!
After we ate our fill, we took a walk in the neighbourhood and ended up walking all the way to Penang's Little India, enjoying some awesome street art on the way.
It's time for our last and final day in Penang! Our flight was in the evening so we still had some daylight to kill in the meantime.
27 July 2022. Wednesday.
We woke up bright and early to make the most of our last day here. I found a good breakfast place on Google and we decided to try this authentic roti canai place called Roti Canai Jalan Argyll:
When my family and I used to travel to Malaysia pretty frequently, we always made a point to have roti canai for breakfast on our last day. It's one of my favourite Asian breakfast dishes for sure.
If you're unfamiliar, roti canai (or roti prata as we call it in Singapore) is a flatbread dish in Southeast Asia that was brought by Indians during the era of British rule. It's usually served with dal or other types of curry and has many variations cooked with meat, eggs, cheese etc.
Source: qi.my
Anyway, this restaurant is supposedly very popular in the neighbourhood, so we decided to check it out. The restaurant itself did look very traditional and authentic, with the chefs preparing the prata outside on these stainless steel grills. The aroma of the prata was amazing!
The walls were nicely plastered but it felt old with the very traditional looking furniture on the inside:
It really feels like we traveled back in time to the early 2000s when I was much younger and used to come to these type of restaurants with my family. It was weird feeling a sense of nostalgia even though I'd never been here before.
Anyway, other than prata they also had other cooked dishes out front with rice that you could order. But from the name of the shop roti canai is probably their specialty.
This was the menu they had with so many varieties of the roti canai, some murtabak, cooked dishes like ayam goreng (fried chicken), and plenty of drinks.
We ordered a few dishes at the counter before we were shown to a table by this very nice man. He probably could tell we were tourists and that it was our first time here, but he was very friendly!
We sat down and a few minutes later, our drinks arrived! We ordered one teh tarik (pulled milk tea drink that's popular in Malaysia) and one iced milo. There wasn't a cold version of the teh tarik which was unfortunate since it was really warm, so I cooled it down with the ice cubes.
The drinks were nice and not too sweet. It'd been a long time since I had teh tarik so it was especially yummy.
After about 15 minutes or so, our roti canai arrived! We ordered an egg prata each, which came with some vegetable dal.
We also ordered different types of curry as well that came a little later. I think the red one is a chicken curry, and the other is fish curry.
The curries looked quite oily and unhealthy but the prata and the dal looked pretty good. It wasn't the crispy kind of prata but we knew it wouldn't be by looking at how it was cooked outside.
It still smelled pretty good though, so we couldn't wait to dig in!
The egg prata was nice and fluffy on the inside but definitely lacked seasoning so you had to dip it in the curry. Traditionally you'd use your hands to eat but thankfully we had utensils since it was hot.
I think the chicken curry was nicer than the fish or the other way around. But the dal was very light and tasty as well. I wanted to order more but we said we'd have a light breakfast so we could eat more stuff later. The drinks also made me quite full especially since we ordered more due to the heat.
After we left the restaurant it was well into late morning by now and the sun was already bearing down on us.
So we hid under this old building in the shade while we waited for a ride.
Since it was such a hot day out, we decided to spend our last day enjoying some air-conditioning indoors.
There was a place in Penang called The Top, which is a skyscraper with the highest observatory in Penang and is probably one of the highest places in the city.
The pictures looked good, and since we have a thing for visiting observatories every time we travel, this was a must-see on our list.
Source: thetop.com.my
It's actually not too far from our hotel, and we could've walked here had we not gone for breakfast. It was a delicious breakfast though so all good. We had some trouble finding where to go since the mall side of this place (called Komtar) was also advertising The Top.
Turns out this building houses Penang's largest indoor theme park and they had some other stuff to see besides the observatory.
We asked the staff for help and they told us where to go, and we could choose which attractions we wanted to visit.
There was also a super pass for a collection of attractions if you wanted to visit a number of them but we decided to go check it out first.
When we arrived at the lobby some floors up, we were greeted by this very tall sculpture, and a huge LED screen promoting the Jurassic Research Center attraction.
I've no idea why they have this man's sculpture here since there wasn't a Ripley's Believe it or Not museum here, but apparently this guy was Robert Wadlor from Illinois and he's known as The Gentle Giant, measured at eight feet eleven inches!
Way to make me feel even smaller than I already was!
We went to get our tickets at the counter and we were quite shocked that each attraction was about 20-50RM if you paid individually.
I guess they want you to go for their package deals so we decided to get the 3 attractions pass since it was the only one with the skywalk and observatory included.
There was quite a lot of stuff just in the lobby for entertainment, but I guess they're mostly targeting kids like this digital shooting range:
I'm not sure who actually plays this but it looked a little like Time Crisis on arcade but with a lot more players?
Unfortunately it looked like we came at the same time as these kids on a field trip so it did get quite noisy.
We were curious what was over here but it looked like it led to the other side of the building, towards the bridge that led to the mall but there was this super huge balloon of the mascot which is this girl monkey that looks quite cute.
In order to dodge the noisy kids we decided to go check out the aquarium first which had a super deep blue lobby.
But I think this post has gone on long enough so we'll cover that next week! 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 #209 (Penang): Enjoying Authentic Street Food and Art! 😋
