Penang, Malaysia

This is the first half of our vacation. We went to Penang, Malaysia. It's on the Northwest coast of the Western half of Malaysia (does that sound confusing)... I don't know if you can see it on this map - it's kinda small, but you can maybe see where it says George Town... that's the city we first stayed in while in Panang.
The pic below is of George Town. It's an old city that the British used to inhabit. As with pretty much all of Malaysia the population is made up of Malay people, Chinese, and Indian. It's really interesting to see all the cultures mixed together. They have cycle rickshaws that are different from the ones we had in M-town. They are called Tri-shaws and the driver sits on the back and pedals and the passenger is in the front... so we go head-first into on-coming traffic! haha! That was pretty fun! One night, our Tri-shaw driver had to go and make change at the 7-Eleven (I love those!!!) and so Adam hopped on the back of it for a picture :)
In one market area we saw some of the locals playing Mahjong. My mom loves to play this game on the computer, so I thought I would include this pic :)The next two nights we stayed next to the beach on a different part of the island. Here's a pic of the view from our hotel room:
One thing I've learned since being overseas is that if the locals don't do something, then it's probaby not the best idea to do it either (it's not always the case, but in most cases it's ususaly pretty wise).... So we went down to the beach. Before we did that, we ate lunch. While at lunch the tourists at the next table overheard us talking about the beach and said we probably shouldn't get in the water...they said that the jellyfish are really bad.... We said thank you to them and went on to the beach. When we got there we saw that NOBODY was in the water... no locals, no stupid tourists, NOBODY. They were even landing all the paragliders on the sand (and they were landing pretty hard too!)... so we didn't swim :) Our hotel had a great pool though - and that was awesome!!

We were going to take a ferry to another island close by and do some snorkling (that's why Adam bought me that cool underwater camera case)... BUT the ferrys were all full and we couldn't get on. Oh well... :) So since we couldn't go and do that, we decided to rent a car. It's been 2 years since we've driven, so we thought it might be fun! Here's a pic of our car:
In our car we got to explore the island and have a lot of fun (oh, and get pretty lost :)

One of the days, we went up to a place called Panang Hill. You can take a train up the mountain and get a great view of the island (as seen in the first pic on this blog).
Adam enjoyed hanging out in this phone booth on the top of the hill... he thought it was cool :)
The Monkeys here in Malaysia are very different than the monkeys here in our part of South Asia - here's a pic... I think they're funny looking (but aren't all monkeys funny looking?) :)

One day we went and saw this M0sque. It's called the "Floating M0sque".... when we went to see it, it was low tide and didn't really look like it was floating, but it was still cool looking :)
One of the new traditions that Adam and I have started to do is to buy a painting or two in the countries we visit. In the Panang Night Market, we found this guy who paints these cool water color painting of local life here in Malaysia. We bought two from them (one was actually painted by his son)... here he is, holding his painting that we bought :)
We had a lot of fun in Panang... our next stop is Kaula Lumpur (next blog post :))