Not counting the travel days that bookend our stay, we’re here for 9 full days. That’s plenty of time to see the sights, eat the food, talk to people, and just enjoy being here!
We started our day with our included breakfast, served on pretty porcelain in the restaurant which is part of Campbell House.
It’s a Western breakfast menu, which makes a familiar start each day before we head out to enjoy more adventurous tastes (although one of the staff was eating delicious looking nasi lemak at an outside table and volunteered to help me order some on the Grab app one morning).
The daily fresh fruit plate arrived with our barista coffees, followed by warm croissants, after which Ted had the French toast and I had Eggs Benedict with spinach, the latter inexplicably without taking a photo. Everything was delicious. The orange marmalade was really an orange compote, not being peel-based, but it and the mixed berry jam, also more of a compote texture, both smelled and tasted wonderfully fresh.
Since things other than breakfast venues really don’t open in Penang until 10:00 a.m. or later, we headed to the terrace to enjoy the morning breeze while catching up on emails and planning our day. We had the entire terrace to ourselves, which made it feel like an extension of our room.
In the afternoon, while Ted continued relaxing, I had a different kind of relaxing in mind: sitting in a spa chair getting a much-needed pedicure. Unfortunately, with almost everyone here having gone to gel nails, getting regular nail polish that I’d later be able to remove myself was a challenge, and the end result less than wonderful – although my rough heels got smoothed, which was the essential part of the process.
That meant our only actual physical activity for the day was walking to the food stalls at Red Garden Food Paradise for dinner. To be fair, after our hearty breakfast we’d skipped lunch entirely, although I had the slice of bread & butter pudding that was this afternoon’s hotel treat.
En route to the hawker stalls a bit of local colour:
It was a case tonight not of the sublime to the ridiculous, but the reverse. We began our evening in a food court where our entire dinner cost 43MYR/$15CAD and ended at the Indigo Bar at Cheong Fatt Tse – The Blue Mansion, where a single cocktail cost 45MYR.
Just to continue the sublime ridiculousness, we ended our evening with dessert and drinks while listening to a rather good boy band at Mangga, the Blue Mansion Hotel’s al fresco food and music venue.
It was a decadent end to a day at leisure.
Rose and Ted’s Excellent Adventure 