Penang -- Week 14 -- The Night Market

Week 14
FRIDAY, June 13th
Day 92

Today is my parents' 44th wedding anniversary. Congrats to them!

George blew a circuit in our kitchen using the forman grill on the transformer. The circuit includes our balcony (with our washing machine) and the storage/maid's room. Fiddling with the circuit breaker doesn't help. Our laundry must sit and wait till we can remember to call the guys to fix it.

Tonight we're salsa dancing. What a great night! It's a big crowd tonight, and several of the ladies I know through Carmen's latin circle (plus their husbands) are there saying goodbye to one of the couples who is leaving in a week. I ask her if she's happy, sad or both to go. She tells me she always thought it was crazy seeing other women leave before her. There would be buckets of tears and she would think, "didn't they know that this was temporary?" But now that it's her turn, she understands a little more. But thanks to the internet, she doesn't really feel like she's saying goodbye in the same way. I guess that's true for me too. I haven't said goodbye to you all in the same way as I would have if this had been ten or twenty years ago.

George is thoroughly enjoying himself, and he's had a drink, so he's grinning like the Cheshire cat, and acting a little silly on the floor. It's fun and I'm having a great time also. I'm also enjoying the fact that we can totally experiment and go wild with our styles here, because no one else knows us enough to know we're not doing what we normally do, plus, the level, like I said, isn't all that high, so most of these eyes aren't all that critical. Still, we're too goofy and laugh too much to be serious about it. We'll never be those dancers.

We're on a total high at the end of the night.


SATURDAY
We've never been to the night market, and I want to book a tour for Father's Day tomorrow. So I suggest we head up to Batu Ferringhi, to kill two birds. It's tourist central, and the location of what is supposed to be the best night market around. We're barely out of our cars before someone from one of the tour offices has stopped us and offered deals. We take one and book a boat ride for tomorrow morning to Monkey Beach. It's supposedly on a "deserted" island just off the coast of Penang. I think he means "uninhabited" but "deserted" sounds so much more exotic, no?

I like the tour guy. He knows a lot about the island, and he's giving me advice for the hike that we plan to do up Penang Hill at some point. He also knows a lot of local history, and I think I might like to hire him sometime to take us around and tell us about some of the things we're seeing. The see-what-you-see experience we've been having is relaxed and fun, but it would be nice to get some context and better understanding for some of the sights.

The night market is an utter waste of time. It's a huge collection of market stalls that set up in the evening along the main drag. It's got to be like a mile long. The stalls themselves carry the following products in the following order: knock-off purses, knock-off watches, knock-off sunglasses, pirated CDs and DVDs, assembly-line art, cheap tourist souvenirs. That set is repeated over the strip about 6 or 8 times, maybe more. Are you interested in those items? Great! When you come visit us, we'll get you a cab and tell them where to take you, because are we ever interested in seeing this again? Uh, no! I'm not interested in knock-off anything or pirated anything, though there was some legitimate art tucked away in the middle that I might go back for sometime.

Where are these markets we hear about where you can buy your necessities or luxuries like helium tanks for balloons? This was a tourist trap, and why do they need 10 stalls all selling plastic Louis Vuitton purses? I was even excited to photograph it before I saw it, but the camera never once came out when I realized what it truly was. By the way, one of the many reasons we're told Penang is so great is because you can get pirated DVDs so easily. Ha! Yeah, that's what we're after. Sorry, we don't do copies of copyrighted anythings.

We did get caught in the accidental bargaining cycle again. Here's what we've learned: if you inquire about the price of something and then try and leave, the price will keep dropping and dropping and they will do anything to hold on to you. If, on the other hand, you see a remote-control toy at one of the two stalls not carrying knock-offs or pirated goods, and you try and intentionally do the walk-away-bargaining technique, it won't work.
George: "How much?"
Girl: "60."
George: "Hmmm... not sure... I will have to think about it. I'll come back later." Begins to walk away.
Girl: "Ok."