In and Around Penang Pt. 1

A picture of myself and the mascot of a Penang-based biscuit company.
I can't decide whether it's adorably creepy or creepily adorable.

Today I realized that I haven't really said much about the actual city of Penang itself. Well, I'm going to tell you SO much about what there is to do in Penang that it will fill two blog posts! Aren't you excited? However, my experience here is in no way a typical tourist experience of Penang. My professor grew up here so he knows all of Penang's best kept secrets like an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant and where to find tea sets for the best price. Also, we're not staying in the "tourist-y" area so pretty much everything we're around is pretty authentic. So to show you some of things I've gotten to see, do, and (of course) eat I've posted several pictures below and tried to explain as briefly as possible what exactly is going on.

Being a person who often thinks with my stomach, I thought the logical place to start my tourist-y collage would be food. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the meals I've had here in Penang, but I do touch on the most interesting ones (at least from the first half of my trip).

In this picture, I'm posing with a bowl of cendol (pronounced chen-dull), one of two well-known Penang desserts. It looks super gross...mainly because it's topped with beans and squiggly green things. Well, it's actually not gross at all. The beans are Red beans so they're sweet (a dessert bean!) and the green squiggles come from the leaves of a local plant. And below all of this is a ice blended with some kind of coconut milk and sugar mix....so overall really good! The only problem is that it can get really soupy when the ice melts.

This equally unusual dessert (possibly more so...) is ais kacang which literally means red bean ice. However, in addition to the obvious ingredients (i.e. red beans and ice) ais kacang also includes ingredients like coconut milk, aloe vera, grass jelly, palm seed, ice cream, and corn. that's right....corn. sometimes...even the infamous durian fruit is added. I would talk about durian here...but ever since trying it the first time I've had no desire to get within photo-taking range of this incredibly smelly fruit. All you need to know about durian is that it smells "musty" and is gooey and cheese-like. And it can take days to get rid of the smell....no thank you. Anyway, ais kacang was still pretty good but I found cendol to be a lot better.

First of all, let me just say this is not exactly what I ate. This is the food I picked out at a local "Steamboat" restaurant, which is basically like a cheaper, more casual, all you can eat version of the Melting Pot (which, in my opinion, makes it vastly superior). All the food is fresh and you pick almost anything and can either grill or boil it. They also have a lot of sauces for your food after you cook it. There was also lots sushi at this place too which made it that much better.

Anyway, that's enough about food...for now. The next set of the pictures deal with various places of interest I went to in Penang during the first part of my trip.

Soo all these statues look they're for sale right? Well...kind of. This is what Dr. Lye calls the "God Adoption Agency." Basically the back of this one temple houses a bunch of abandoned or forgotten shrine or temple statues that can be...well...adopted. It's technically free, but it's disrespectful not to donate some money to the temple itself. Still, it's a really cool place and I definitely picked up a really awesome Kuan Yin statue here. They pretty much have every Chinese god here in some form...big or small. Almost all of the statues are incredibly elaborate and extremely well made. This is definitely one of those places I would not find on my own if I was a tourist in Penang.

If you go to Penang, you will notice that pretty much every street is filled with these types of buildings. These are called shophouses and were built by the Chinese and Indian immigrant communities way back (some of them date to almost 200 year ago). The reason they're called shophouses is pretty obvious: the shop is the first floor and the top floor(s) are the house. This is still the case in some shophouses but I've noticed that most are either all shop or all house in most of Penang. Shophouses come in a bunch of different styles, depending on the time in which they were built, and some of them have a lot of history. For example, the blue shop house pictured above was Sun Yat Sen's HQ for plotting the Chinese Revolution of 1911...pretty cool. The yellowy-cream colored one next to it (the color is called orche is was originally produced from cow urine...not something I'd personally want my home covered in but I suppose it looks nice...) was a really cool modern art gallery that showcases local Malay artists.

The inside of the historical shophouse once occupied by Sun Yat Sen. Now, it's a full time museum and pretty cool to walk through.

So next are some pictures of various religious sites in Penang. None of these are really related to my research, but they're definitely interesting.
This is one of the most famous Chinese temples in Penang. It's actually the oldest one as well, having been built about 200 years ago. It's called the Kuan Yin Temple, largely due the fact that it's dedicated to Kuan Yin. So who is Kuan Yin? Well, basically, Kuan Yin (sometimes written as Guan Yin) is a bodhisattva (Buddhist for an enlightened being) associated with compassion and is generally associated with East Asian Buddhism. Kuan Yin is also notably depicted as a female (though some groups view Kuan Yin as male). Because it's the oldest and most well-known temple, there are always a lot of people there and there is a lot of incense. You can even buy incense in the form of joss sticks, which are basically giant incense sticks that can be exceed 4 feet in height. This tends to make the inside of the temple pretty hazy. Actually, most temples ban the burning joss sticks over 4 feet inside temples because this creates too much smoke.

This picture shows devotees at the Kuan Yin Temple lighting incense which can be placed in any of several places around the temple. In addition to incense, a bunch of other things can be offered or purchased to be given as an offering. It's also pretty common to see people buying oil to refill temple lamps. This temple was also the first time I saw people using divination tools, etc. One method is for a person to shake containers of sticks with fortunes inside until one falls out and then the fortune within that stick is interpreted. There are many different "flavors" of these sticks. The one's at the Kuan Yin temple tended to have more general information in them while other temples may have one's that give everything from lottery numbers to medical advice.


This is another kind of Chinese temple called a Kongsi. Kongsi temples aren't really dedicated to any major Chinese God and are instead more for the worship of the ancestors of a well-established Chinese clan or a local Chinese deity, such as Tudi Gong. However, this does not mean that they are less impressive than those temples dedicated to major Chinese deities. In fact, many, including the one shown above, are more impressive as far as size and ornateness are concerned. One Kongsi temple we visited (not shown here) had absolutely massive ancestor plaques in the back of the temple, much larger than any altar to a deity I've seen as of yet.
Seeing as Malaysia is "officially" a Muslim country, it makes sense that I'd visit at least one mosque while I was here. So I did and I ended up getting to go inside the largest mosque in Penang, the Kapitan Keling mosque. It's one of Penang's most historic mosques and is about as old as the Kuan Yin temple give or take a few years. This particular mosque was constructed by the South Indian Muslim community in Penang. The term South Indian Muslim confused me at first seeing as I thought that most Indians that were Muslim live or moved to what is now Pakistan, but then I realized that this community was established well before India and Pakistan became different nations. However, this is not to say that the Indian community is exclusively Muslim as it is most definitely not. There are lots of Hindu temples all over Penang, but they are much more particular about photography in their temples and have more rules, regulations, etc.

This is a picture of me inside the Kapitan Keling mosque.
Note: Grandma, if you're reading this, please don't have a heart attack. It's just a photo opp I promise.

Well, that's it for part one. I'll try and put the second one up in a couple of days, but I have a lot of work to do for my research so hopefully it won't take me too long!