Time to get a work visa

Well… plus a dependent visa for me. We traveled to the northwest coast of Peninsular Malaysia, right by the Strait of Malacca, this place is called Penang Island, we stayed in the city of George Town. So yes it is a weird mix between Malay, Thai, Chinese, Burmese, Indian and British. Take a look on where it is located here.

This place has a lot of street art, good food and nice beaches, we found a Mexican restaurant that wasn’t that good, but I never expect to find a good one being so far from my land, but we were happy to try anyways. Then obviously we tried local food on the street. To move around initially we got a taxi, the meter wasn’t on, so I indicated the driver to turn it on (as a good chilango, I know what he was trying do) the driver didn’t want to use the meter, arguing that it might be even more expensive to use it, he said 30 ringgit, finally, despite his multiple calls to his ‘boss’, he agreed to turn the meter on and we ended up paying 18 ringgit. Eventually, after knowing that Uber works there, we decided to switch and we had free and discounted rides.

The 3rd largest Reclining Buddha in the world

We went to this nice temple where the Reclining Buddha is the main attraction, it is the 3rd largest according to their records, funny thing, you need to take off your shoes but also be aware of shoe thieves! If you planning to visit Penang, stop by here, look for your shoes and visit the burmese Buddhist Temple right across the street.

Beach at Batu Feringghi

A really popular area, with restaurants and hotels along the beach is located in Batu Feringghi.

You can find families, friends, people from multiple religions, all of them having fun, except, in my humble opinion, the muslim women wearing their niqab, also called a ruband, I don’t think it is comfortable neither safe what so ever.

Alex was so excited to see the people enjoying the parachute, even after watching some of them face landing or simply in a chaotic way; but she trust me and she wanted to try, so we did close to the sunset which made it even cooler and in our case smoother, smooth take off and even better landing, ahuevo!

After such a long day, we deserved a nice indian food.

The attack of the monkey

No, not me, I’m super nice with Alex.

There is a famous beach to visit over here its is called Monkey Beach, as the name suggests, many monkeys come to hang out, it is part of the Penang National Park and it is located here.

You have two options and we discarded the obvious one for us because we needed to adjust to the embassy hours, so we didn’t hike to the beach, instead we went to Teluk Bahang and took a boat from there, the guide was super nice to use and we decided to visit another part of the area were they take care of baby turtles, you cannot touch but Alex was already melting with such beautiful creatures.

On your way to the turtle camp in Pantai Keracut, which is here, we saw a couple rock formations: the turtle, the crocodile and the rabbit. So on our fist stop besides turtles we saw monkeys, none of them interested in us, they obviously never have seen a hot mexican, their miss. The fisher man in the area know good and basic spanish: Ay caramba! they said.

Once in Monkey beach, we realized that the place is really calm and slow, maybe just because it wasn’t the high season but there is a natural cool shower, and the ‘make a wish tree’. This crazy guy living in the beach out of selling coconut and cold beer has this crazy idea of writing your wish in a peace of foam and put it on the tree, the higher the wish the faster it will become true, such a crazy idea, but because I share the mental state, we wrote our wishes and I climbed the tree as high as possible, to be honest I have no idea how the hell the highest wish got there, but I tried hard and I expect to have our wishes come true.

Right there in the Monkey Beach, two little leashed monkeys were calm and looking nice for the photos. I asked Alex to take a pice of the coconut and feed the while I take pictures. ‘Bad monos’, one of them simply ignored her, the other one looked interested into the Michigander, not exactly the piece of coconut though. I guess the feeling of touching the sleeve of the windbreaker that she was wearing made the monkey curious to the point of wanting to bite her, fortunately his teeth were not sharp and there was not skin break. I wanted to take revenge but I took care of her instead, ‘bad not-hombre’.

Close to the garbage collector we found a Milo lover, just as me.

The artistic side of George Town

The street art is all over George Town, there are even tours to see it all. We save some money and literally just out of luck we found all of this and more but I think the best is here.

Even our coffee that morning was a 3D coffee, try to guess which one we got at Coffee On The Table.

Alex joined a trash band, literally empty cans, buckets, an old tea pot and a tennis racket w ere just part of the instruments, this time not on the vocals but on the tambourine, you rock blanquita! In my case, I rode a motorcycle and a bicycle and I tried to help a dinosaur from the tight leash of his owner. We went to the music museum and DJ Michigander-er-er played her last DJ-set.