Breakfast was included in our hotel rate and this hotel had quite a good breakfast buffet - lots of Western choices and a lot of local choices as well.
Made to order roti canai with chicken kapitan curry. There's also a little bit of a Indian style coconut curry (with mustard seeds) on the left. Their roti was really good. I was planning on getting photos/video of them making it near the end of the trip, but well, best laid plans and all....
Beef rendang with coconut rice cooked with pandan, sambal and ikan bilis, with some pandan and cassava cakes.
This cute monitor lizard was a slow moving companion for a while, as well as the relentless crows!!!!
After breakfast, we went to wander around George Town, the main city of Penang and a UNESCO world heritage site.
Stopped to get a drink, a Mountain Dew type drink that we've had in Singapore before:
Penang is a fascinating mix of cultures - there's Chinese, Peranakan (descendants of Chinese men who arrived in the 1800s and married Malay women), Indian, and more.
What is this? A very popular food in Penang is called Nasi Kandar - it's basically rice with a bunch of Indian style curries. Most Nasi Kandar places are open 24 hours and are always busy. This line is for the oldest NK place in Penang, called Hameediyah. We wound up standing on line for about an hour and a half.
Once you get inside, you see:
The inside line, plus the guy making murtabah - which is roti dough stuffed with egg and other stuff, then fried.
The menu:
Prices are in Malaysian Ringgit - around 4.50RM to 1 USD at this time.
Many different curries
Fried shrimp and cuttlefish
Stuff to get on the side - vegetables, little fried crabs, hard boiled eggs...
Biryani rice (you could get plain or Biryani rice - pretty much everyone got the biryani rice) with ayam bawang (chicken with onions) and rabbit curry, with basically all of the curry sauces dumped on top, plus some okra for vegetable. The ayam bawang is one of their famous dishes - the chicken is fried and then buried under a pile of caramelized onions for at least 90 minutes. Supposedly, this restaurant goes through 70kg of onions per day just for this dish! The rabbit was a special (we saw a sign for it out front) - it turned out to be the most juicy, tender rabbit we've ever had!!!
Awesome lime juice, not from concentrate.
The fallout from lunch:
While we were out, we saw a fruit vendor and picked up some for the room:
The pineapple was awesome - super sweet. The mango, not so much. It was juicy but completely flavorless.
By dinner time, we were exhausted (jet lag) so we decided to stay in the hotel and just get some snacks:
chicken satay
stir fried bok choy.
