Our alarm didn't go off this morning so we didn't get up quite as early as planned and were our by about 11. We walked to the bus station to book our transport for tomorrow before wandering around trying to find somewhere to eat. We walked past a garage where an Indian man gave us directions and also forced/offered some kind of Indian food on us. It was a sweet, round ball of bright orange something which I ate and showed by appreciation but Liam wouldn't eat it!
After finding something we started following the map to various tourist hot spots of George Town. It's a really lovely place, it's bustling with activity from all kinds of cultures. It's colourful with very odd buildings that are a combination of Chinese, Indian and English looking architecture. It kind of reminded us of England in some places which I guess makes sense as it was founded in the 1800s by and English man. George Town is the inner city and is a unesco world heritage site because of its unique cultural and architectural qualities.
Walking around was actually quite difficult today just because it was so hot and humid. We were out walking for around 6 hours finding all the different tourist places such as the fort Cornwallis, various temples, museums, coming across the street art. A lot of the history seems to be Chinese, but there are also churches and mosques dotted around so it was all very interesting and beautiful to look at. It had been so humid but then mid afternoon it rained loads and we were stuck inside a weapons barracks at the Cornwallis for a good while listening to the thunder and waiting of the rain to stop. After 6 hours of being on our feet we had had enough so we found a chinese run cafe and had some special health juice drinks with all sorts of different vegetables and fruits blended together. We then went and had a lovely curry near our hotel. It was nice walking back after because we'd had curry and the streets were bustling with Indian music and smells. It felt like a safer, cleaner version of India...which I guess is why it's called "little India"! It would have been good to have a extra day or two to venture further into penang but we can't have it all.
Anyway we got back to the hotel around 7pm or there about and settled down to watch a DVD before having a fairly early night ready for our travel day.
