Back to Penang

After our visit to Chiang Mai we returned to our former island home of Penang to visit with old friends and see old haunts. It was kind of a good feeling coming back, though after a day with the heat we remembered how much we disliked the sticky humidity.

This time around we spent a few days in Batu Ferringhi, where we used to live, and then a few days downtown. Those days downtown certainly have a different feeling than the beach community in Batu and made us think that perhaps if we had lived in Georgetown when we lived there our feelings about Penang would have been different. 

Back in Batu we spent a day running the aquaduct, going to the Spice Farm, and evenings at Long Beach hawkers market. All things were nice and food delicious, but we did have a run in with that old "wtf Malaysia" feeling at the Spice Farm as they tried to cheat one of our friends out of 500usd.

 The scam was this; When walking the Spice Garden you are given a small device to play at each numbered station to tell you what spice you are looking at. Our group of 4 had two English, 1 Chinese and 1 Japanese language device. After two hours walking around the garden we returned our devices and headed to the adjacent gift shop. It was at this time that an employ came and asked a few times, to our Chinese friend, if she had broken her device. She denied it and the rest of us agreed as none of us had seen her doing anything that would damage the device nor noticed damage ourselves. The employee went away, but then as we were leaving we were confronted again, this time by the manager and two employees who demanded we pay 500usd for the device we'd broken. The device was clearly cracked, liked clearly, and there was no way our friend or the rest of us wouldn't have noticed if they gave it to us broken. What we suspect is that they had a device that was broken and waited until a chinese person came along (numerous reasons why they choose chinese). They tried negotiating with us for a lower fee, then tried to say we had to pay and that they were being truthful. Well, in the end none of it mattered. Even if we did break the device, there was no contract or waiver saying we were responsible for the device (certainly if it was worth 500usd there would be) We didn't pay but having people argue and try to cheat you doesn't lead to a wellspring of good feelings and so we decided that was enough for the day. We went back to the hotel, showered up and headed out for dinner, sunset, and beers.

 The last few days we spent bumming around Georgetown, gift shopping for a friend, doing laundry, and meeting up with an old colleague/friend of ours. 

By this point we had remembered that you can't really go out from 11am to 4pm and so we had a routine of walking, napping, and then heading out for dinner. All in all, it was a relaxing time and I'm very glad we went back again.