June 30 – Bus Day

Today was basically spent on the bus. Borna and Alex left us the day before and Jen and I struck out on our own to Penang. Penang is the home of current and former Purdue students Tze and Johnson.

Our guidebook said taking a bus this far would be horrible, but it wasn’t horrible. It did take a few hours longer than we had thought it would be. It ended up being about 10 hours total. I guess it’s just your state of mind.

One thing was interesting as we stopped on the road at a rest stop. I have seen this before, but they sell corn here like it’s cotton candy or something. They have these little carts where they spoon you up a few scoops of corn, add a little butter and salt and hand it over. Reminds me of those Indiana days where we just sat around and ate corn.

We took a taxi to the Banana Guesthouse. When we arrived some guy tried to trick us into going to his hotel instead acting like they were the guest house we were looking for. I think not.

This turned out to be a decent joint, however the bathrooms were not particularly spotless as the guidebook suggested. The room was a little dark and jail-like, but had the basics: concrete floors, bed, a/c, running water (cold only), wifi. Actually apart from the Internet access and the slightly wider space it wasn’t too different than Alcatraz. The bathroom was down the hall where there are shower stalls that double as a toilet. I think my brother Jon would truly appreciate the bathroom multi-tasking that could be accomplished here.

One redeeming feature of the Banana house was their orange juice. This had to be the best orange juice I ever had. I’m not sure exactly what they did, but it seemed as if they just had a juicer and they put a couple freshly peeled oranges in. They must have been good oranges.

That night we took to the streets and experienced our first real Malaysian hawker center. It’s sort of like a big Asian food court with all kinds of creepy, mysterious foods. There is a bit of a process that you have to figure out to get going. You first claim a table somewhere. You have to do this first because when you go to the food stall you tell them what you want and it gets delivered to your table when it’s cooked. That’s also when you pay them, on delivery.

Here’s a video of some of the delectable food options available for purchase. If your connection is slow you might have trouble running this.

I tried some Char Kaoy Teow, which is some mix of Asian things. It was quite delicious. Jen attempted some skewed chicken bits. She said it had a nice spice grilled into it.