Fatlo.af

Break out the comfy seat and get ready for a slide show of magnanamous proportions. This is of course the highlights, perhaps even cliff notes of what was my jaunt to the lovely island of Penang.

All in all while it was filled mostly with variances of shopping, relaxing and eating. It was quite a good holiday with a bit of resort incompetence thrown in for good measure. For those who’ve never been there, I’m sure there’s a few of you, its a lovely place still populated by those who remember fondly the times of RAAF personnel wandering around the place generally making nuisances of themselves. Filled with many dodgy shops selling goods which look and smell like the real thing but are generally filed under the category ‘genuine imitation’. Truth be known, they probably are the real thing but are just pushed out of a different part of the factory to the guys out the back with the truck and the evil henchman with an eye patch and a cane. While you can buy the real thing, can you be sure it is actually the real thing or just a copy in a shop with a ligit ‘authorised dealer for brand in question’ certificate out the front. Of course that could just be a copy too, who knows.

Malaysia seems to have some strange, yet interesting rules regarding the sale of copied goods. In the night markets that frequently sprout like weeds along the side of the road along the Batu Ferringhi area, there are many many vendor’s selling t-shirts and dvd’s, all of them genuine imitations. Now, when Johnny Law comes blazing their way he’s never too happy with the situation and if the guys aren’t on the ball and have scouts with radios letting them know of the imminent arrival of the polizei and packed up their less than scrupulous goods then they get a bit of a fine. However, if you run a shop in a shopping centre which also sells these goods, then you don’t seem to come under these laws and can operate without any issues at all. I’m not too sure on the finer points of these laws but its a bit weird to me.

I will be uploading plenty of images as soon as I get the chance (see: I’m lazy), these include the crazy and wonderful food products you can buy over there too.

In the last week of the holiday, we went to the Cheong Fatt Tze mansion and the Kek Lok Si temple. Let me tell you about this guy Cheong Fatt, he was a fairly big player back in his day. He had several houses, 8 wives and plenty of money. He was basically one of the first people to come up with this whole world banking system idea back in the 1920′s. Check out his website for a bit more info. The whole building is in this royal blue colour, quite distinct from others around it and is designed using the theories of Feng Shui, very cool. Too much history in that place to talk about, lets just say it’d be a nice place to live as long as it had internet access.

Kek Lok Si is pretty damn impressive, I’m not going to go into the history behind the temple as the website covers all that for me. If you really want to know, you’ll visit it. Needless to say, it was a spectacular place. Although the fact that most of the japanese tourists and even the local’s that were there couldn’t seem to understand the multitude of ‘silent please’ messages around the place. It is a functioning temple and respect should be given to places like these. You can’t escape idiots no matter where you go.

Penang is a great place, nice people, nice weather, nice places to stay and exceptionally nice exchange rate right now so you can go and buy cool electronic gadgets and half the price.

That’ll do for now I think, I’ll get the pictures uploaded sometime over the weekend so be sure to check it out.