Penang, Malaysia: enchanting street art of Georgetown!

It happens very rarely to us to visit any city with so much fun when ticking off sightseeing points from our ”prepared” list, as it was the case with Georgetown – the most  fascinating and colourful city of Malaysia built by the British. The city’s colonial and Chinese architecture with temples representing various religions attract a plethora of tourists. The capital of Penang was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008. Strolling down the streets, in addition to admiring stylish buildings, you can enjoy the time exploring wall murals on the city buildings, majority of which was painted by a Lithuanian artist, Ernest Zacharevic, giving the city a unique image. Even with a map in your hand you may sometimes be surprised by the result and confused when reaching a particular place as some of the paintings have been “hidden” somewhere in the back of boutiques or shops. Many times when looking at the map you are sure that you reached the place you wanted to reach, but in fact you need to look around, up and down trying to find a hidden wall picture as it’s sometimes not so obvious. Finding some of them is pure satisfaction and then it’s time for playing trying to fit you in with a mural image to be an integral part of it and snap a riveting photo 🙂 If you ask us, we spent a wonderful time in Georgetown:)

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Vietnam: what things disappointed us vs. what made us want to come back for more!

Before going to Vietnam we kind of couldn’t wait for this experience counting the days until we got there. We heard a lot about Vietnamese cuisine considered to be one of the best in Asia, we heard about friendly and hospitable people we were going to meet there and we hoped that it would be less touristy than Thailand. We got a little disappointed by some situations and people and we thought that at some point Vietnam turned out to be jinxed in our case (especially we had the impression that we had bad luck with people that we were coming across during our journey). Later we changed our minds a little bit and found some pluses in regards to people, tourism and Vietnamese cuisine.

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Vietnamese New year – how is it celebrated in Hoi An?

Tet Nguyen Dan (known as ” Tet ”) is the most important Vietnamese holiday. This is the period when the Vietnamese celebrate the Lunar New Year (the date is taken from the lunar calendar). It is a movable feast, which falls at the end of January or in early February – at exactly the same time as the Chinese New Year. This year the Vietnamese have celebrated the New Year on January 28. It is said that the celebration lasts normally 3 days, but in practice we saw it continued up to 1 week and it significantly differed from the typical New Year celebration in Europe.  There are no grand balls and parties, it rather resembles the Polish Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, when gifts are handed in to relatives who gather together at a big table covered with lots of nice food. Let’s have a closer look at it then 🙂

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Swastika on marble statues of Buddha in Da Nang! Where does it come from?

Swastika for most of us has been a symbol of Nazi concepts. Germany during the 2nd World War completely usurped this sign and left it with its negative connotation up to present times. Why did we start to wonder whether this symbol has always been associated with nazism? Well, we went to a place called Marble Mountains located near Hoi An in Da Nang and surprisingly we found the sign of swastika on the marble statues of Buddha, and exactly in the center of his chest .. besides, the symbol was also illustrated separately and it was quite big, so it was not difficult to notice it .. at first it seemed abhorrent for us, then later awoke our curosity and we wanted to find out more about it … and dig into the history of the sign..

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