Penang Post! – Part 4

Continued from Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3

The last day of our vacation. Sigh! We only had one item on the agenda, and no prizes for guessing it involved food – specifically lunch! But before that, we had our standard awesome breakfast at Spice Market cafe. They had an awesome Blueberry Crumble and the banana cakes had been fantastic for a couple of days now!

We didn’t have a lot of time to digest it, because we had to leave the hotel by 2 and had very minimal time for lunch. We took a cab to the Living Room Cafe (actually walk-able, but 10 MYR away by cab) which served fusion Malaysian. A small cafe on the main road that also sells art. They had quite a few interesting photos around  – Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin, Muhammad Ali & the Beatles etc. There was also a band practicing. I ordered a Cider, D an banana juice and we waited for what we had come for – Beef Rendang. We got talking to an American lady who had been in Batu Ferringhi for 1.5 years and planned to stay 2.5 more. We wondered what it must be like. Meanwhile, the beef rendang did prove to be an excellent choice.

We reached the hotel well in time, and made our way to the Airport. I was reading Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass House and as we were on the one hour flight from Penang to KL, the first mentions of places whose names we were familiar with – Butterworth, Georgetown – appeared in the book. Read in the book’s context, it added to my sense of melancholy.

At KLIA2, we quickly checked in the baggage and started hunting for dinner options! 😀 The Oyster Mee Sua in Level 1 looked interesting, (Shihlin Taiwan Street Snacks)  and we decided to try that first before going to Level 3 which houses the departures. The Mee Sua was tasty though the almost raw oysters take some amount of getting used to. We took a short walk to build more appetite and see the splendid view of the runway. After a LOT of debate, we settled on Nyonya Colours.  We started with Chee Cheong Fun. Chee Cheong means pig’s intestine, but the name is only because the noodles (fun) is rolled tightly enough to resemble chee cheong! While I had my regular Cendol (this one was perhaps the best I had in Malaysia) D asked for a Teh Tarik, which was excellent. Ended the meal with a Kole Kacang, which reminded me a lot of the Mallu ada.

As we walked towards the departure gates, we realised that The Fish Bowl soup was available at one of the outlets, but every order would take 30 minutes, they said. Damn.

The walk to the departure gate reminded me of the street art experience. It was such a long way away! Make sure you keep enough time for this, especially since there are duty-free liquor stores to distract you! I was actually distracted by this giant LEGO Yoda! Our Air Asia flight took off on time, and my thoughts were echoed in the bookmark, so thoughtfully left by the Shangri-La staff when (I assume) they saw the books in our room.

“Shangri–La was lovely then, touched with the mystery that lies at the core of all loveliness……Conway was physically happy, emotionally satisfied, and mentally at ease” ~ The Lost Horizon