New Years Eve in Penang

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First of all 'Happy New Year' to everyone! I well and truly painted the town red last night and as a result I am now sporting quite the hang over today. Will I ever learn.... probably not!

Luckily I arrived in Penang a couple of days ago which meant I had plenty of time to sus out all the options for the big NYE celebrations. Like all big cities (and Penang is definitely a big city to my surprise) it has a good mix of bars, restaurants and caters well for the tourists whilst still being very much third world city at the same time... its actually a really interesting mix.

My NYE plan was to basically go from one bar to next in search of English speaking tourists and try to spark up a conversation with them... Now I know this sounds terribly simple but its actually quite hard to find English speaking tourists in Penang itself (most of them tend stick to there big all inclusive resorts out of town from what I can tell). Penang is a tourist hotspot for a lot of countries and from what I have seen I would say the majority of them come from within Asia itself.

Now to start with I was a bit apprehensive about going out by myself in a foreign city like Penang for a big night out but as luck would have it I met this top bloke from the UK as I was literally having my first 'tiger' beer. He was a professional skydiving instructor and it turns out he split up with his girlfriend a couple of weeks ago but decided that he would come on a trip they had booked anyway. So needless to say after a few more beers we hit it off and went in search of more nightlife together. It didn't take long for the beers to change to vodka and the mischief to begin. Later on we ran into this fun group of girls from all different parts of the world ( I think they were all teachers??) and the rest is history. By the time we all finished up the sun was coming up and everyone retreated back to their accommodation for some well needed sleep.

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