Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion or the blue mansion is a world heritage site in Penang so naturally I thought this would be a good place to visit with someone from out of town. I also had not been there myself so was curious as to what it looked like. We arrived just in time for the last tour of the day. There are three daily and make no mistake, if you don’t take the tour you can’t just wander around the house. We entered the foyer of the mansion to wait for our tour to begin, but when it did the guide took 25minutes of the 1 hour tour standing in the foyer explaining the mansion and history. Basically a Chinese migrant had come to Penang, amassed a fortune, and built this opulent house sometime in the 1800’s. It was then left to rot until the early 90’s when it was restored and given the heritage site distinction. The tour’s pace was aggravatingly slow and we were not allowed to take any pictures or stray from the tour. After 25 minutes we took about 10 steps and entered the inner courtyard where she went on for another 15 minutes or so before taking 10 more steps to enter an adjacent adjoining room. By this point we were all a bit itchy to see the rest of the house because we had basically not seen anything more than what was in our site line when we first entered. A few other people had the same idea apparently because they kept wandering off to take pictures only to be scolded by the house security to not take pictures and stay with the group. Eventually we said nuts to that and wandered around on our own for a bit, got scolded, and then left before the tour was finished. I would NOT recommend this if you are visiting Penang. It is a beautiful places, but aggravatingly restrictive. You would be better off doing something else.
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