Lost between two cultures

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I leave Little India alone - it might be better named Little Tamil Nadu since nearly all the Indians living in Penang seem to originate from the southern Indian State of Tamil Nadu - and walk the short distance to the Kuan Yin Teng temple dedicated to the Chinese Goddess of mercy, good fortune and most importantly....FERTILITY, always a hot topic in the history of mankind.

You wanna found a new religion, you should dedicate your new God or Goddess to FERTILITY and you can be reasonably sure to get lots of worshippers, especially so among the Thai and Chinese people who love children!!!

Big huge clouds of dark grey and black smoke greet my arrival coming from a couple of hot stone furnaces where numerous devotèes are burning paper money, enormous burning incense sticks stand around at random, somehow to my Ferringi mind looking like fallus symbols - not really such an absurd idea considering this temple is among other things dedicated to the concept of fertility.

I watch the worshippers burn tons of monopoly money marvelling at the genius of the Chinese mind, why go to the financial burden of expensive offerings when the Spirits and Gods that rule the communal believe of a billion people are perfectly happy to accept plain old paper...it is the gesture that counts after all!!!

This is a busy place but I soon enough find what I'm looking for, a small girl selling finches in rediculous small cages. The ideas is plain and simple, you set the birds free, let them fly back to their freedom and good luck will befall you!!!

Incense for my own Karma hoping it will give even more benefit to my eternal soul - my Phii as the Thai call it - hoping the Divine Beings that rule even my Western mind will not let me come back as a cockroach in my next life cycle. Just a couple of Ringit for the birds and the incense will prevent me from a life time of wallcrawling and bad luck. If it doesn't harm me, well maybe it just might help me...

Maybe all of this might sound like complete bullsh*t to most of my blog readers but I can assure you that most Farang/Ferringi old hands to this part of the world have become just as serious about all this stuff as me. They are easily recognised wearing a Buddha pendant and the far away look in their eyes...Southeast Asian superstitious slowly but inevitably crawling into Farang hearts and minds doing their positive destructive work on your Western trained way of thinking, making you feel lost in your very own mind between two distinctive cultures, no way out for you but to give in to your fears and inhibitions!!!

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Photos

temple statue
in Penang

Kuan Yin Teng temple
in Penang

Chinese temple in Penang
in Malaysia