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:)
The city is simply fabulous. Street art on stylish buildings gives it a soul and climate. You can see this street art absolutely for free and no visit to temples or numerous cultural museums in Georgetown will make you feel so enchanted as while having a chillout walk through the picturesque streets of the city. Here below you can find a lot of photos from the street 🙂
Ernest, a Lithuanian artist mentioned before, skill-trained in London, was sent to Penang to create an exceptional image of Georgetown. Many other artists, e.g. Desmon Yeo and other local ones from the group called Artists for Stray Animals also contributed here. The wall murals were given simple and purely descriptive names, like e.g.:
”Love Me Like Your Fortune Cat”:
”No Animal Discrimination Please”:
Unfortunately, not all their names are known to us. Many murals contain additional real-life elements such as: a chair, a motorcycle, a bike, a swing, etc. The maps.me application has the following names of the wall murals uploaded (there are 25 of them in the application, but in reality there are much more) 🙂
‘’Brother and Sister”:
‘’Brother and Sister on a Swing’’:
‘’Susu Soya Asli & Segar’’:
‘’Children Playing Basketball’’:
‘’The Indian Boatman”:
‘’No Smoking Area’’:
‘’Old Motorcycle’’:
‘’Dog Catch’’:
‘’Bruce Lee’’:
‘’The Bee Do Bee Do Bee Do Minion’’:
‘’Kids on Bicycle’’:
‘’Little girl pulling up on windows’’/”Kungfu Girl”:
‘’Girl on Turtle’’:
‘’Cats and Humans Happily Living Together’’:
‘’Kitty’’:
‘’Little Boy with a Pet Dinosaur’’:
A map with street art murals (and not only them) can be provided for free anywhere: at homestays, hostels, at the airport, at a tourist information.
In the street at the buildings you will also frequently find “drawings” made of metal elements:
On our map we had 52 ‘metal-like’ drawings (unfortunately the map is already in a degraded state, so we’re not attaching it here :P)
In our next post about Georgetown you will find a lot of practical information about how to get there, where we slept (we will recommend you a nice place), which cultural museums and which temples we visited, what attracions we skipped due to our limited budget and whatgoodies we tasted (you have probably already heard that Penang’s cuisine is considered to be the best in Malaysia! 🙂 and we can’t deny that fact :)).
