Friday afternoon, as Taynah and I were sitting on the bus on our way back from exploring the culture and tastes of Penang, she looked at me and said "At least your blog will be easy for the week." I immediately responded with "No, I am going to have to figure out how to fit this entire weekend into a blog post and not a book." At around 9 pm last Tuesday night, I was online googling different flights to start getting some ideas about places to travel to during the rest of my time in HK. I was on the Cathay Pacific website and saw there was a cheap fanfare for Penang leaving Thursday at 8 am. I had never heard of it so I googled it and found that Penang is in Malaysia (one of my bucket list places). I quickly messaged a few friends asking if anyone wanted to go to Malaysia that weekend. Taynah was in my room five minutes later and less than an hour later we had our flights and a hostel booked. After we were booked, we started actually researching Malaysia and Penang to decide what to do while we were there. We found out we didn't need Visas to enter Malaysia, that our hostel was extremely safe and clean and we also found out it was supposed to rain all weekend (as you can see, we got way too caught up in the spontaneity of the moment but it worked out fine). Lucky for us, Penang is a city rich with beauty, history and is the food capital of Malaysia. It is the perfect mix of the local culture and just tourist-y enough for us to find plenty of things to do. We navigated our way around Penang like pros thanks to our wonderful hostel worker, N'Jah, who helped guide us to the buses every day. It didn't rain on us once--in fact the weather was in the 90's all weekend. We were in long skirts to respect Malaysian culture while we toured the temples which made it even hotter. We found so much to do in Penang that we could have easily stayed for another week. Our hostel was on a street lined with more hostels, so the living area felt comfortable, safe and full of people in the same situation as us. This last minute trip could not have been more perfect and lucky for us. This past weekend I fell in love with Malaysia and even more in love with Asia. I never expected that I would have such an incredible, mind-altering experience in three days in Malaysia but I did. The amount of respect I grew for the Malaysian culture is crazy. I met beautiful people and was blown away constantly by the raw beauty of Penang. Leaving Malaysia was unexpectedly sad for me. It was the first time that I have left a place truly not knowing when I will be back. Someone wrote this on the wall of one of restaurants by our hostel (everyone writes on the walls here to leave their mark) and it made me so happy. It may be years before I return to Penang again but I will one day and I can't wait to write on the wall. Here were just SOME of my favorite things/moments from my weekend in Penang:
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Time for my favorite picture of the trip (I am pretending there was only one favorite but Malaysia is way too beautiful for only one). I will post more on my Photos page!
This is one of the many beautiful views of Kek Lok Si. This isn't even half of the temple. Kek Lok Si is so colorful and incredible. I was standing in an eight story pavilion when I took this. It had a breathtaking view of the city and the mountains. Penang is absolutely beautiful and I couldn't feel more lucky to have had to opportunity to spend the weekend in Malaysia.