My output of stunning photos of Malaysian landmarks on Instagram has dropped this past week, for a few reasons. The first is that Penang’s landmarks are a little tough to get good camera angles on. The city is old and densely packed enough that a lot of the sites are crammed into narrow streets, where I can’t back up enough to get a good picture that isolates the interesting parts of whatever I’m looking at and cutting out all the noise. The second is that temples and mosques, which I find to be the most interesting buildings, share enough features that they start to look really similar after a while. But the biggest reason is that Penang so far has been about people more than anything else.
I’m staying in a part of Penang dotted with hostels and hotels and centred around Love Lane, which is the main street for bars in the city. This does make it a touristy part of town, which means that there are plenty of expensive European-style cafes and fancy air-conditioned bistros, but the Malaysian character still shines through with authentic restaurants and Penang’s famous street food stalls interspersed between them.
Love Lane’s bars seem fine, if expensive by Malaysian standards (which these days are my standards as well…I can barely stomach paying more than 15 ringgit for something, even though that comes to about $4.75 Canadian), but the real star is the nearby liquor store. Tucked away down a side road, behind a Buddhist Temple, is a tiny storefront named Antarabangsa, meaning “International” in Malaysian. Here, in an operation that’s almost certainly not legal, you can buy alcohol at near-rock bottom prices, grab a plastic stool from a nearby stack, and sit on the road with dozens of other patrons – mostly international travellers but a few locals as well. It’s a unique experience that even a Malaysian traveller called “OG”.
With that touchpoint, the backpacker community here really feels like a community. Groups of people form, join other groups, break apart, and rejoin again as they explore the city, hunt for restaurants, or just look for a place to get together and drink. It makes for a very cool social experience that makes me glad that I’ll be spending the holidays here.
And, of course, I get to share a hostel with a couple of very cute kittens.
The travellers here are a varied lot. Mostly Europeans, but no one country is particularly dominant. There are plenty of Germans, of course – it’s entirely possible that you could go deep into the Amazon and find an indigenous people there whose only contact with the outside world has been with German backpackers – followed closely by Dutch and Brits. But I’ve also met Australians, South Africans, Egyptians, Japanese, a handful of Americans, and of course a couple of Canadians.
On that note, let’s talk about what people think about my country. In general, foreigners don’t know a lot about Canada, but they know they generally like the place. They can’t tell the difference between Canadians and Americans (To be fair, though, can anyone? Seriously asking. If you know, spill your secrets.) They also kind of sorta know who our Prime Minister is, so I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of my picture with him. Which isn’t even a particularly good picture with him, disappointingly, but that’s more on my inability to dress than anything else.
(Incidentally, anybody who seriously believes the hackneyed line that Trudeau is the laughing-stock of the world clearly hasn’t left the country in the last four years. People bringing up Trudeau to me do so with a tone of vague positivity but total uncertainty, because the real painful truth that Canadians encounter when travelling abroad is that nobody overseas really thinks about Canada much at all, positively or negatively.
But anyway.)
Despite the heavy socializing, Penang is actually a relatively quiet stop on my trip. I’ve started to think of my itinerary as sprint-stop, sprint-stop. That is, spend a leisurely couple weeks in one place, then do a quick run through a couple of other places to see as much as I can in a short period of time, then stop in another place for a bit and take it in. Penang is a stop – although maybe it’s just that holiday feeling. All I know is that things feel calm, and it’s hard to complain about that. So Merry Christmas to all and Happy Holidays to everyone that gets offended by that phrase.
Harmon Moon 