Last night I met my room-mate. I had showered & was washing my clothes in the shower when she walked in and she laughed & said, "ah! that is what I did. Good idea - you must be French! Ha ha"
Her name is Rabia from Tunisia. She is 50 & travelling alone. She lives in Paris.
We chatted for ages & got on really well. She is fun and we went out for dinner together. I must admit, it was so nice to have someone to go and eat with. She had quit her job as an Economics lecturer as she is fed up with it. She has been travelling round Thailand and is making her way through Malaysia.
She had bought this bright pink top which she wanted to wear & was putting on lipstick......she offered me some but I declined. She's very glam 😄
She has a boyfriend from Prague and it sounds like they are going to try to settle together in Scisily - Siracuse. Maybe start an airbnb business.
She had been chatting with some people who run a restaurant in Ipoh - a 'Middle Eastern' restaurant called Oldies. As she was born in Tunisia of Tunisian parents, she speaks Arabic as well as French & English & so had been chatting with them in Arabic. I think she fancies starting a business here too, in Malaysia. She'd promised to eat there so that is where we ate.
The food was delicious! I had a chicken dish called Chicken Haneeth - a traditional Yemeni dish with slow cooked chicken marinated in a blend of aromatic spices.
After this we went to the night market, trying to find a place where she had eaten this really great iced dessert with fresh fruit and ice-cream. It took a while to find it but we were chatting & laughing.
We passed this posh hotel and she joked that if it had a swimming pool she was going to go tomorrow & blag her way in.....if she got questioned she would make up a room number and say her name was, "Maria Rodriguez from Brazil".....🤣
.....sounded like she'd done it before.
We found the place in the end. A little Chinese run stall run by a lovely man who was Chinese/Malay but spoke great English.
The desserts are huge, but we shared one. It was really nice! Flavoured with Rose syrup and lots of really nice fruit and ice
I bought some batteries from the night market to replace the ones I'd had confiscated and we wandered back to the hotel at around 12am!! Way past my bedtime.
We were laughing about the fact that our room has no lock as it's broken......just the fact that reception didn't think it strange "oh you can just push the door to open it, we only have one key card for the electricity slot"......you had to be there......she really made me laugh!...
21st January
In the morning I caught a bus out to a park which had more limestone cliffs and a lake, Mount Lang, or Gunung Lang in Malay.
As with Indonesia, there is a lot of rubbish lying around. It's a shame that such beautiful places are not looked after.
You had to get a small boat to the park across a lake, for 3 myr.
The park was very peaceful......apart from the man with the leaf blower.....and I wandered round it for a while.
The lake was formed after the centre of the cliff had collapsed so was like a giant bowl. I saw an Eagle, floating above the mountain - he was big!
There was another cave temple nearby, Loong Thow Ngam, which seemed less taken care of.
A man there, asked me if I was from Australia & said it was 150 years old
Once again, I was waiting at the wrong bus stop and the bus didn't stop
Strolled round the old town markets again & went to the museum but it was closed. It has has many uses over the years & used to be a place where the miners hung out in the tin mining days.
This is Concubine Lane, where the rich Chinese used to house their mistresses back in the day
It had started raining so I headed back to the hostel via the park
Later on it chucked it down, but then the rain eased off, & eventually stopped, and we went out for dinner again, meeting up with a really nice Malay boy, Rabia had met, who was on holiday from South Malaysia (near Singapore) with his Aunt, Sister and Grandmother who is 90. His English name is Bryan.
He spoke many languages that he mostly learnt by downloading free books from the Internet and is going to Frankfurt in April as a student. We were giving him a few travel tips and he was telling us all about Malaysia.
He said they have a saying. 'You go to Singapore for work, Thailand to have fun and Malaysia to live.'
A lot of Malay people just go to places because they like the food there or a particular restaurant.....like the old guy at the Ice-cream place last night. He said he would visit 'KL' (Kuala Lumpur) just to eat at a particular Chinese restaurant. Bryan and his family had stopped in Ipoh because they like certain food places here....plus the Grandmother wanted to see some of the architecture that reminded her of when she was a girl growing up in downtown Singapore. He says she remembers the Japanese occupation during world war 2 - it was very interesting.
We ate at a Thai place, & had Tom Yum with rice & then had a walk around looking for dessert & stopping at a cafe for a drink (non alcohol). In some shops you have to take off your shoes before you can go in.
Once again, it was fun to have company 😊
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