I’m just back from a short holiday to the Pearl of the Orient, Penang. While the holiday definitely needs a couple of posts, here are some teasers from the trip. So here is Instagram Interludes – Penang edition!
Street Art at Armenian Street
Penang Street Art
Penang Street Art – most are around a cluster of streets around Armenian Street
Penang Street Art – found this on the side of a building
Tiles at the Penang Peranakan Museum
“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” – Saint Augustine
We’re leaving Penang in a few hours now and I am already having ‘Holiday Blues’. I love taking holidays and love the whole process – right from researching locations and hotels to tracking airfares, planning the itineraries and looking for great places to eat…. I am a planner by nature and so this job automatically falls to me. I can even spend time reading on the best way to pack!
I want to see the whole world and experience not onluy different cultures, but also unique experiences in each of the places we visit. We’ve not done a lot of travel till now, preferring to visit places in the region, rather than travelling afar, but now that BB & GG are all grown up, it’ll be fun to visit newer and more adventurous places without having anxious thoughts on nap and meal times!
One place I really want to visit is Europe. I love reading historical fiction and loads of these are set in Europe. I want to experience the Pantheon, the Tower of London, the castles of England, Scotland and Ireland, the Louvre and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Oh and the art in all the galleries!! All those places I have only read about, I want to see and breathe in the air.
I have always believed that travel gives you that edge of sophistication that nothing else does and it is for this reason that I want GG & BB to see as much of the world as we can afford before they are thrust upon the world. Travel is an education that no school can provide you, it teaches you to go out of your comfort zone and learn to get along with people from diverse cultures. Children grow up to be well rounded individuals with a global perspective which will stand them in good stead through their lives and in anything they choose to do in life. How better to learn about the beauty of this planet we call home than by travelling….
Gosh! All this talk of travel is making me itchy to go somewhere else. We do have our trip to India to look forward to in December, but now I really need to save up and go somewhere else….
I need to get going now or we’ll miss our flight back home, but once I am back home and have sorted the hundreds of photos we took, I’ll do a couple of posts on Penang.
Great Australian Outback School Stories – Bill Marsh
If your teacher commuted to school in a plane; if you had to watch out for rogue bulls rather than traffic; if your daily pick-up was done by a horse – you probably went to an outback school.
This collection of more than sixty stories, gathered by Bill ′Swampy′ Marsh in his travels across Australia, perfectly captures the experience of life growing up in the outback. Whether you loved school or not, these stories will bring a smile to your face and maybe even a tear to your eye, as students and teachers alike share their yarns and memories of a time gone by.
…this little kid, he spun around at me and he snapped, ′Piss off, Miss.′
Of course, I immediately replied with, ′Excuse me. In this school we always use our best manners when we talk to teachers and adults. So what should we say, then?′
And this little kid, well, he looked up at me all sheepish and he said, ′Well then, Miss, piss off, PLEASE.′
A South Indian Journey: The Smile of Murugan – Michael Wood
Some time in the future you will come back here to Chindambaram and you will make a pilgrimage, said the astrologer to Michael Wood as they sat in a small airless house in Tamil Nadu. It is the most important thing you will do. Four years later Michael found himself on a pilgrim bus heading southwards on a journey of more than a thousand miles through the temples and holy shrines of Southern India. The bone-shaking bus, its aisle crammed with passengers on folding chairs and its video showing glimpses of old films through a blaring snowstorm of white static, would transport him into another world and time where the rituals at the spiritual heart of India are still observed as they were a thousand years ago, existing side by side with all the trappings of the modern world. As his many admirers know, Michael Wood is the perfect travelling companion, eyes and ears wide open, knowledgeable yet eager to learn. His touching and humorous account of this inner and outer journey captures both the life-enhancing spirit of Hinduism and the essence of India itself.
The Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah – Tim Mackintosh-Smith and Martin Yeoman
All the best armchair travellers are sceptics. Those of the fourteenth century were no exception: for them there were lies. Damned lies and Ibn Battutah’s India.Born in 1304 . Ibn Battutah left his native Tangier as a young scholar of law; over the course of the thirty years that followed he visited most of the known world between Morocco and China. Here Tim Mackintosh-Smith retraces one leg of the Moroccan’s journey – the dizzy ladders and terrifying snakes of his Indian career as a judge and a hermit. courtier and prisoner. ambassador and castaway. From the plains of Hindustan to the plateaux of the Deccan and the lost ports of Malabar. the author reveals an India far off the beaten path of Taj and Raj.Ibn Battutah left India on a snake. stripped to his underpants by pirates; but he took away a treasure of tales as rich…
Memories and Such 