Beauty in Darkness

Last weekend I was in Penang, an Island in the north of Malaysia and apparently a powerhouse of manufacturing and such.

The place is buzzing and real nice to explore. There are thousands of these great shophouses. The picture here is "borrowed". Along the busy roads there are plenty of little shops, stuck in these shophouses. There is a mixture of eeriness that you have in movies like Blade Runner or in the streets of Hong Kong, coupled with an upbeat atmosphere that tells you they have something going.

The sad part is that most people don't take care of the properties and many of these beautiful shophouses decay.
Though this adds to the great atmosphere, it is sad to see this happen. If I could, I would buy one of these places, do them up nicely. Live upstairs and Mei Mei can run a pet shop on the ground floor. I would love to have a corner unit with a view of a busy intersection.

The other saddening part is to see a lot of homeless people in Penang. When I was walking around, I saw this skinny old man lifting his mom out of her wheel chair and resting her on the sidewalk to sleep. This is particularly embarrasing and sad if you follow recent news on Malaysian politics, where each party is trying every trick to stop the other one. While the country is suffering (NB: Malaysia has lost a lot of Foreign Direct Investment recently) some people play play. We shall see where that leads.

In the meantime we have learned that we are very lucky with our apartment in KL. New neighbors end up paying twice as much as we do.