A Weekend in Penang: Eating My Way Through George Town

The bus from KL takes about four hours. I took the overnight one, which deposits you into Georgetown at dawn with a slightly stiff neck and the particular alertness of someone who has slept in an unfamiliar upright position. The light at that hour, coming off the Strait of Malacca and running along the old shophouse facades, makes the stiff neck more than worth it.

Penang has a reputation as a food destination so total that it can obscure everything else the island offers. The food is, genuinely, extraordinary — the char kway teow from the legendary stalls, the curry mee that announces itself three streets before you find it, the asam laksa that divides opinion so sharply it has something almost political about it. I ate all of it and would eat it again immediately.

But the city that frames the eating is also worth your attention. George Town is a UNESCO heritage site in the way that best definition of that designation: not preserved under glass, but lived in. The same clan houses that have stood for a hundred years now have WiFi passwords on their walls. The street art by Ernest Zacharevic — murals painted directly onto the old brick — has been joined by dozens of iron rod sculptures, each marking a local story.

The bookshop is on Armenian Street. You will know it when you find it because it is the kind of bookshop that makes you miss the plane — the kind you only find when you have been off your phone long enough to look up.

Go for a weekend. Stay an extra day. Eat the hokkien mee twice. Take a bus up to Air Itam and spend an afternoon at Kek Lok Si, the great hillside temple above the rooftops — it is forty minutes from Georgetown and earns every minute of the climb. If you are coming from KL, the slow guide to that city is the right warm-up — the same pace applies to both places.