Little India in Penang

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Malaysia, Penang, 15-02-2009.

Little India is a Hindu enclave smack in the middle of Goergetown just off Lebuh Chulia, it is an inviting place to stroll around, especially so if you have been to India before!!!

Hindu music blaring out of the many Bollywood video stores will greet your backpacker's ears well before you enter this typical Indian neighborhood, chai shops with over-sweetened Indian tea which in India is called Chai, colorfull shops specialised in saris, a tradicional dress for Indian ladies, clouds of sandalwood insence, big red spots cover the streets, a leftover from the juice that comes from beetlenut chewing - ARGHHHH and there goes another big red colored load of spittle coming from an Indian throat hitting the pavement and splattering around waiting for the next shower to wash it away.

Countless vegetarian banana-leaf restaurants, GREAT, I can eat Masala Dosa again!!! A sort of vegetarian potato dish wrapped in a huge thin pancake to be eaten by hand, your right hand because the other hand is used to clean your.....welll, I'm sure you get the idea.

Hindu temples all over the place. GREAT, they will make a nice little detour from all the Buddhist Wats I visited in Thailand. Sit around and soak up the religious admosphere while the locals tend to there pious duties, paying their respect to Lord Shiva, Lord Ganesh or any of the other countless Hindu Gods - I know of no religion where there are so many Holy Dieties or Holy Books for that matter!!!

Maybe have a chai at the chai shop across the road and watch the locals with their long grey beards, great characters for my sketching, watch the Ferringi - in Malay we are called Ferringi as to Farang back in Thailand - from all around the globe. Some of them down and out, backpacking Southeast Asia on a bare excistence, the Lonely Planet guide their Holy Book and most expensive possession, old ragged jeans and sweaty T-shirts, flob-ons or plastic slippers on unwashed dusty feet. Some of these alternative types have long breaded beards and Rasta hair, are clad in orange wrap-around pieces of cloth, resembling the Sadhus I remember so well from my own trips to the Indian sub-continent.

Then there are the middle-age Europeans and Americans, colorfull shorts and blouses, expensive camara and video equipment resting on McDonald Hamburgers induced layers of fleshy fat, are their Holy Possession, walking slowly and looking around wide-eyed, ohs and ahs mixing with the blaring Bollywood music, wiping the perspiration from sunburned brows. They too are good characters for my sketchbook!!!

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Photos

Indian
in the chai shop

Shiva and Parvati
dancing the dance of Creation

oil flame
in a Hindu temple

Comments

[anthony]

Shiva & Parvati
Somewhat related i was looking through my dictionary of symbols under volcanos see mountains has nice 3 pages on the topic of mountain.In included shiva and parvati as mountain metaphor. An artist and those who do deity worship might enjoy the golbal historical cosmic evolutions of the mountain symbolism.Penquins dictionary of symbols great reference for the arts and science. Bye bye winter soltice going back to moniter earthquakes geology .How many earthquake moniter are there in the Himalayans gps stations earth sciences.