Cats Dancing Through Color Wheels

Apparently stealing life jackets from airplanes is a thing for people leaving Indonesia, because before we land in Kuala Lumpur, the flight attendants specifically announce the exorbitant fee and jail time involved in being caught.

In any case. I catch up with my friend Noel for a day in KL. We hit the climbing gym and eat some REALLY freaking good chicken and rice, and somewhere along the way Noel assures me it’s the dry season.

It pours every day.

Seriously, if this is the dry season, I don't want to know what the monsoon looks like. Black clouds twine low over karst mountains in dancing wisps reminiscent of dark magic as my bus heads north toward Penang (having left Noel behind with his new soul mate in the form of a black and white kitten at the bus station).

Penang is known for food, street art, and old, old buildings and culture. Georgetown, tucked into the corner of an island off Malaysia’s northwest coast, reminds me a bit of Melacca: a time warp of a well-preserved old town in a port city. Street upon street of old Chinese shop houses pack the historic district. Spunky bakeries inhabit 100-year-old buildings next to old-style print shops. My hostel is housed in a building over a century old.

I lose myself amongst Chinatown’s narrow streets. I eat LOTS of cheap food: there’s more variety here than I would know what to do with if I stayed for a month. That being said I have absolutely no idea what I’m eating, because menus are simply transliterated in their entirety. It’s like translation and explanations don’t exist here, even though the country’s two main languages happen to be Bahasa and English.

I wander Jetties crammed with weathered wooden houses, built amongst family groups and extending into the strait between Penang and mainland Malaysia. Although they appear shabby from the front, a peek inside doors left ajar for ventilation in the heavy heat reveal slender, spacious homes.

I find street art everywhere I look. Children riding motorbikes. Simpsons and Yodas eating pizza with Obama. Cats climbing though the color wheel. Old men swallowing archways whole. Bruce lee kicking a cat across the street. A wild girl riding a sea turtle.

Chinatown’s narrow, busy streets cradle clan houses: 1,000-year-old family complexes centered around temples built of carved stone and gilded in gold, moral foundations and teachings and histories displayed in floor-to ceiling murals.

 Somewhere along the way, Chinatown gives way to Little India’s controlled chaos.

Bollywood music blares, street side stalls sell pirated DVDs by the hundred and strands of radiant marigolds hang from wire racks. Open-air restaurants spin my into a haze as servers gesture and spout foreign sentences and eventually arrive with plates full of naan and chicken tikka for less than three dollars.

I spend a grand total of four days basking in Georgetown’s vibrant mix of deep, multilayered mix of colonial and eastern culture and color. Then I spend no less than two hours in line for a passport stamp, and leave the island behind.