George Town in Penang is one of my favorite cities in Southeast Asia. It has a unique blend of architecture, street art and hawker food.

Whenever you visit a new city, you typically go from one attraction to the other but here, it feels like the entire city is the attraction. You can get lost in it’s heritage houses, beautiful murals, steel structures along with the wall paintings gives it a realistic feel and ofcourse the multicultural food.

I stayed in the old Penang guest house. It’s a beautifully restored pre-war building in the heart of Penang very close to the Pinang Peranakan Mansion and also the famous Chulia street.

Chulia street lights up in the evening with hawker food stalls and a multicultural cuisine of Chinese and Indian Muslim community. You can also explore both China Town as well as Little India here in Georgetown to get the taste of both the cultures.

I loved walking around this beautiful town specially to the Chew jetty, fort Cornwallis, Esplanade and watching the street arts all around.

Chew jetty is an old traditional wooden houses built on the jetty, Chinese immigrant population live here. It’s a beautiful place to walk around and observe the local life.

Fort Cornwallis is a historical fort built by the British East India company by the then general of Bengal. It’s right next to the beach and it’s a lovely place to spend time in the evenings. Esplanade has fort Cornwallis, Cenotaph war memorials, lot of museums and ancient buildings.

Next day we went to Penang hill… Took a rope car to reach the top. Visited the Kek Lok Si buddist Temple and also an Indian Hindu temple. We had our lunch at a hawker stall at the foot of the hills, had some hot rice noodle soup.

Later that day we visited the Pinang Peranakan Mansion. With many cultural groups living closely together in Malaysia, the Babas and Nyonyas (or Peranakans) grew as a dominant ethnic group in parts of Malaysia especially in the Straits Settlements (Penang, Malacca and Singapore). They were initially part of a Chinese community. This place is definitely worth visiting with lot of antique collections and experience the lifestyle they lived couple of centuries ago.

Notably Penang has lot of private museums to visit. We ended going to few like a camera museum, arts museum, food museum, antique collection museum and many more.

This is excellent place to roam around on your own and experience different cultural affairs…..  As a traveller in Malaysia you definitely need to have this place ticked.