Before our short stay was up we managed to do one other thing that Penang is supposed to be famous for--visit the street art in Georgetown. Lithuanian artist Ernest Zacharevic is credited with starting the collection of street art here. I'm afraid I don't make a very good tourist; I wasn't all that interested in the street art persay, though it was fun hunting them and occasionally taking a photo with them--but there were so many people!! I was satisfied to just stand and gingerly admire from afar, and not have to jostle with everyone cueing up to take photos. So please hit up Google if you're interested to see proper photos!
Street art itself is such an interesting concept. Art which insistently defines itself as part of ordinary life, by removing itself from the barriers and glass cases and DO NOT TOUCH signs and pedestals of exhibited art. Paintings you can lean against, rub your fingers against, measure your height against without feeling like you're desecrating something. Art that attaches itself to the infrastructures of your everyday life--the walls you pass by, the streets you know by heart, the road you walk on. Art which makes itself your neighbour, which weathers the roughness of every day together with you and any other person.
So it added to the value of the street art to see how worn and faded some of them were, especially since I'd seen them previously in all the glory of high-colour HD on tourist postcards or blog photos. To see the real big orange cat "Skippy" gave me a surprise; the big cat was so faded, and his face especially from so many hands patting him, that it made him seem like an aged, tired old cat. Looking at him with this sort of sympathetic thoughts in my head, it was like looking at something living, and being able to sense the experiences it had gone through; the same feeling when I massage my grandparents' feet and think about how much, how far those wrinkled feet have gone.
I think what I most enjoyed actually was the random picturesque bits we stumbled across in our hunt for street art. When I looked at them and tried to catch them in a photo, there was a satisfaction in knowing that my photo might be the only one in the world of it; unlike the street art, of which definitely there would be tons of better, more beautiful photos. My one photo would let others appreciate that little piece of beauty that I saw, and set it apart.
Swing doors like the saloon's in those in the old cowboy westerns! I loved the colour palette here. Age accomplished the aesthetic that Pinterest moons over, effortlessly.
I never knew dying bamboos would metamorphosis into a golden cloud like some kind of phoenix.
Outside this little coffee shop, I found unexpected charm in the basket of sugarcane shreds next to the sugarcane juice machine, a rickety pau (steamed bun) stand, and a random framed picture of a panda eating bamboo.
And frangipanis, one of the few flowers I grew up with in our (largely) flowerless world of tropical green. With their distinctive buttery hearts and their strong sweet smell, like a little girl innocently spraying on too much of her mom's perfume. There are pink ones, white ones, even dark red ones, but these pink-edged ones are more rare.
And here is ONE photo of the street art in Georgetown--part of the "101 cats" series meant to raise awareness for strays. I love how not too far away from each cat there would be a rat of some sort, in some cases hidden, others more obviously, as with this one.
For the last installment of Shrimpy's adventures:
In the bustle of moving out, Shrimpy found his mom!
I said I wouldn't talk much about food, but there was one dish that stood out to me--Indian mee goreng (fried noodles) which also had potatoes, fried dumplings, tofu, squid, lime, and lettuce in it. Definitely something new from the standard mee goreng I'd grown up eating. What made this dish so unusual to me however was its charismatic creator, a flamboyant Indian uncle with flawless Hokkien (way better than my nonexistent Hokkien) who insisted we 'kongsi' (share) one plate since we were too full to eat one each. Just try lah! Did you know my picture is in the Singapore Museum's food section? Why you never take photo just now when I was making it? I make another plate just for you to take picture--see! I have a video of him adding each ingredient with lavish flicks of the wrists, booming, "And this--and this! Ahh this is what you do!" in the background while his assistant does the frying stolidly with an expressionless face. Maybe he has to eat all the extra plates that are fried just for publicity to win the hearts of goggling tourists.
The noodles were fantastic, by the way. All the greasy goodness and wok hei (that smoky fragrance of food fried in a cast iron wok, when the fire is big enough) of mee goreng and blended with that the fresh taste and crunch of lettuce, and the tang of lime. It was good.
Alright, I won't pretend to be a gourmand anymore.
We did do one more touristy thing--we went to order the famous tau sar peah (mung bean) biscuits! As it turned out those things cost us a lot of worry but they were the least we could do for the friends and family who had sent us off. After all, it is the unspoken rule that every Singaporean who visits Penang comes back bearing either tau sar peah or nutmeg in some form or Penang White Coffee (but in 99% of the cases, tau sar peah is the rule.)
It was my first time seeing these things actually being made. As we waited inside the old, unpretentious shop house (it didn't have air conditioning, so you could smell the fragrance of baking biscuits) for the old lady manning the chipped glass counter to figure out how much we ought to pay--in the end we had to help her calculate--there were baskets of them laid out to cool like this. I asked to use the washroom and got to peek at the back of the shop house, converted into a big kitchen where several older men expertly made them. No pictures, if you please. There was plenty of rivalry and politics in Penang among the fierce competition of various tau sar peah shops.
(A quick anecdote about the adventures of these biscuits: On the way back to Singapore, our overweight luggage--mainly because we had three boxes of these biscuits with us--cost us a lot of anxiety as we waited in line, trembling in our shoes, to be allowed on board. The big scale by the side of the entrance was giving me the jitters and I was wondering how much we'd get fined if they decided to go hard on us, and whether it was possible, if it came to the worst, to consume three boxes of tau sar peah, one each, on the spot. And then--never say God doesn't answer prayers--just as we were steeling ourselves for the examination, and trying to look as puny and innocent as possible to makeup for our overweight luggage--a family of four, right in front of us in the cue, tried to pass their suitcases as cabin sized luggage, failing spectacularly. We watched on, taking in how much extra they had to pay, and the suitcases being set aside and tagged. When it came to my turn, probably looking bug-eyed with trepidation at having to eat so much tau sar peah, the attendant barely even glanced at my luggage and waved me past. Talk about providence.
I celebrated all the way onto the plane feeling like a badass tau sar peah smuggler--I have no idea why; probablydue to the relief at not having to eat them all--until I saw the man in the seat across from me lugging a spectacular TEN boxes of tau sar peah, five in each hand, without blinking an eye. I quietened down after that.)
But most likely the highlight of the entire trip was the sunset we managed to catch, on just one evening, at out seaside apartment (the next evening it was rainy, and clouds obscured the view.) We raced back home and stumbled onto the balcony just in time to see this:
(without any digital enhancements or filters, mind)
On the other side of the building, as we scrambled madly to unlock the door, the sky looked like this; you could see the colour seeping in slowly like something from one of those chemistry videos.
But as we set foot on the balcony the colour exploded, filling the whole sky. For the first time in my life I consciously considered why we needed the word "rapture," and what it felt like, what set it apart from "happiness" or even "delight."
I'd never had so much sunset at a go before, and 'had' is an appropriate word because experiencing that felt as personal and simply direct as eating or drinking something, as if you were absorbing all that colour. It made my heart swell, in echoes of what I felt during my London trip where I tried to describe the sensation of "smallering."
It looked impossibly like unicorn land, surreal in its almost neon pinks and purples, with the sea framing it in sure smooth strong lines, sweeping towards the shore. I looked at the tree-covered mountains outlined against that sky and that sea, and felt like I was looking at some animator's work from Moana or something. Standing there, I couldn't help but remember how I had written a sunset scene in an old novel, a seaside sunset which incredibly paralleled this one, even down to the colour scheme, though I had only been fishing from my imagination. Down to my protagonists' reaction, who, like me, had never seen so much sunset at one go before, and felt like wanting to bottle all that colour up, to drink it, to pour it around herself...I wanted to immerse myself in it. To soak in it, somehow contain some of it in me before it disappeared.
Well, I suppose that's what writing is about, isn't it? To be able to create experiences we've never had, yet relate to.