Malaysia: Day Five

Day Five Wednesday 24 -  

Was supposed to be a trek up Penang Hill, but we decided to head to the beach. The beaches here are not as cool as those in Langkawi, which is not that far away by ferry, as we seem to have discovered by all the offers in shop windows to purchase tickets to Langkawi. We caught the 101 bus in Georgetown, which took about 45 minutes to get us to Batu Ferringhi. We got there at noon and pretty much everything was buttoned up. The beach is narrow and the tide was almost all the way up it, so the only way to use it was to stay at one of the few open shops which faced the beach. We went back to the main street and had a rice lunch, stopped at a store for drinks, and then headed back onto the beach.

I took of my shoes, immediately stubbed my toe, and headed into the water which was awesomely warm. I was considering making fun of Yvonne for staying all dressed and shoed up, but for some reason didn’t. Which was good, because when I got out of the water the sunlight revealed I had torn the tip of my big-toe-skin off. LOL… hadn’t noticed the bleeding til I was back out of the water.

Yvonne heroically trekked back to the store for a bandaid, and we caught the bus back downtown..

And my walking for the day was over.

I thought!

As it turned out, Yvonne had bought tickets to Gurney Plaza, because she knew there were some bookstores there. So, then, with bloody toe tightly encased in a bandaid, sock and shoe, I had to follow Yvonne from pillar to post as we looked for bookstores. First stop MPH, which was just a boring regular old bookstore in an upscale mall.

The next stop was more fun, as I figured out from the Google map that the bookstore must have been in one of the old fashioned, many-storied interior malls across the street from the Penang Adventist Hospital. We rolled up the stairs and around each floor, but no bookstore. I spotted a little corridor rolling off to the back, which led us to another little internal mall, and lo and behold, the bookstore was there on the 4^th floor. If I hadn’t been dizzy from blood-loss, I would have celebrated. It’s an interesting place, with a group of older men playing some kind of dominoes/card game next to me, and two kids playing some kind of card game. Lots of fantasy type posters, books, and games. Get your nerd fix here!

Then, a stagger back to the food court and the hotel.