Penang, Malaysia: Day 3

Saturday, August 26, 2012

It's getting hard to keep track of days since we're a day and a half ahead of PST.  Today was our last day in Penang.  We convened down at the hotel's buffet again for more ramen and Indian breakfast food.  We had planned for today to be a lazy day of hanging around until our checkout at 1pm.  There really isn't much to do in Penang besides eat at the Hawker food stands. The hotel agreed to let us lock up our luggage in their store room while we waited out the day before our ferry and train ride to Kuala Lumpur.   We met down in the lobby at 12:30pm and literally sat around until around 3pm drinking beers and eating an appetizer plate.  Mind you, we finished our buffet breakfast at 10am and had the appetizer plate around 1pm.  In all, today we had four meals. 

Breakfast buffet:

Sticky rice

Brie and crackers along with a curried lamb with rice.

Miso soup

The buffet special of the day: Fried chicken roll.  Nick said that
it tasted like the chicken bakes that you can get at Costco.

Appetizers plate at the bar.

After sitting in the hotel lobby for a few hours, we headed out into the heat to look for other means of entertainment.  We ended up at, you guessed it, another place to eat.  We had been hearing a lot of the famous White Coffee and stopped at a chain called GeorgeTown White Coffee.  I preferred the hot coffee to the cold, but both were very similar, if not the same, to cappuccinos.  With all the milk in my iced coffee I was not feeling well at all later on in the evening.  It made for poor ferry and train traveling. 

Many places in Malaysia have you write down your items on
ordering tickets. 

We need these buttons at home!

Nick's green jelly tea.  It was WAY too sweet.

Seafood Laksa at GeorgeTown White Coffee.

Iced coffee

The juice stand across the way from the coffee shop had
interesting looking hotdogs.

Melissa and Dennis got the "murshroom" hotdog (left) and curry dog (right).

For the rest of the day we hung out at one of the many malls in the area.  To support the local art college, the mall had a small craft fair where there were students selling their wares and drawing caricatures.  We had one of the students draw us.  We really must have looked like fat Americans to him.

Look how skinny the couple is in the picture in front of ours!

All of the other people who were drawn were skinny! This
must be how we really look to the locals.  I wanted to get
this made into a poster to have as our guest sign in at the
wedding, but maybe we'll go to Pier 39 and get one done
instead.  Maybe we should lose some weight first...

As a final time to eat, as if we really needed one, we went to a restaurant in the mall called Kim Gary.   By this time I was not feeling well, so I didn't eat anything.  I'm a little surprised to see so many milk products here as I was under the impression that a lot of Asians are lactose intolerant.  They sell a good amount of soy milk also, but I think for these coffees they give regular cow's milk.  Who would have thought that the coffee would make me sick and not the dirty street food?

Hot tomato-cabbage soup

Honey-lemon green tea

Hot milk-tea

Mr. Fong's clay pot with egg and eel. 

Boiled Coke with ginger

Fried pork chop

Ye-Ma's dish of minced meat and egg really had me worried.  If you can't tell,
this is a completely raw egg.  The idea is to mix into the hot meat, but the meat
didn't look hot enough to cook the egg.  We ended up pouring it into Mr. Fong's
clay pot to try to cook the egg more.  Ye-Ma was fine.  I was the one with nausea
and motion sickness later on in the evening. 

Trying not to barf in our tiny train cabin.