Itemized Reductions

  Travel  4 Responses »
Mar 062006
 

When is the right time to write about Penang?

After is when.

After the ini­tial fas­ci­na­tion that mag­ni­fies the slight­est of con­trasts into exotic sin­gu­lar­i­ties has worn off. After over­com­ing the shock of being sur­rounded by peo­ple speak­ing my lan­guage, of hav­ing to watch what I say; of not look­ing too out of place in a large gath­er­ing of peo­ple not dis­cussing immi­gra­tion issues. After the joy of see­ing an Indian restau­rant at every street cor­ner has been washed away by the watery sam­bar, after real­iz­ing that tea with con­densed milk is not such a great idea.

Now is when. But what?

Surely not the archi­tec­tural dichotomy of George Town, fos­tered by arcane rent con­trol laws. Through which the mas­sive, utterly char­ac­ter­less Kom­tar sits right next to the mod­ern Pran­gin Mall, and seedy, unpainted estab­lish­ments occupy most of down­town. Noth­ing we haven’t seen before, right? Even though blind mas­sages aren’t exactly the norm in most places.

Con­tinue reading »

 Posted by Karthik at 12:16 am

Whatever

    Life,  Travel  2 Responses »
May 232005
 

So we are in Penang now, stay­ing at a fancy hotel right on the ocean front. And the wife wants us to go exer­cise some, what with the fancy hotel adver­tis­ing that it had a whole recre­ation park on the premises. A fully equipped gym­na­sium, and a water­park. We go there, and are greeted by this:

Any entry and or usage of the recre­ation park and its facil­i­ties is sub­ject to the con­di­tions that the hotel is not respon­si­ble or liable for the loss or dam­age to any prop­erty and or per­sonal effects, injuries or deaths whato­sever or how­so­ever suf­fered from the entry and or usage of the recre­ation park and its facil­i­ties whether in con­tract, tort, neg­li­gence or howsoever.

We ran back to the room.

PS: Later, we braved the dis­claimer to go back to the recre­ation area. Lavanya got on to the tread­mill, and pressed sev­eral but­tons repeat­edly in futile attempts to start it. Then I tried some. And then, we called some­one for help, and he said “This tread­mill only works in man­ual mode, sir. Auto is broken”

“Man­ual is fine, how do you start it.”

He gave us a funny look, and said again, “Man­ual, sir. You get on to the tread­mill and push the thing back with your legs.”

This time, we really ran back to the room.

PPS: Penang is a lot of fun. Food is inex­pen­sive, the weather is Florida like, every­one is so friendly. Add to it the plea­sure of talk­ing to peo­ple in Tamil and hav­ing them actu­ally under­stand it. So very cool. Every­one seems to have a job, and there are no vis­i­ble signs of poverty any­where. Per­haps India will look like this a few years from now.

 Posted by Karthik at 10:11 am
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