George Town / Penang

We left Koh Lanta early on Sunday morning and decided to make the long journey to Malaysia in one go, rather than stopping off in a random town in Thailand and wasting a night and 2 days travelling. We were told it would be a 10 hour journey which would get us to Penang for about 6pm. As it turns out we were 3 hours late and had to change bus 4 times. I have to say though that the journey wasn't too bad and we had some time to grab lunch, which was quite interesting. We ordered hawaiian pizza, what we got was a blob of dough with peas, carrots, sweetcorn, mushrooms plus chicken and cheese and the only regular hawaiian ingrediant was pineapple. It tasted better than it looked and it amused Colin and I.
We got 20km away from Penang and were excited to be so close to our stop, but from the time we saw this sign to when we arrived took over an hour, as the driver first dropped off all the local passengers right at their front doors and then had to go back on himself to drop us.
On the way to one of the local girl's house, a young Western guy on a moped drove up to the window where the girl was sitting and gave her a big cheesy smile. She tried to ignore him, but when he smiled the second time and knocked on the window she wound down her window. Without saying hello, the guy asked her where she was going and the rest of us in the bus thought this guy was trying to chat her up and couldn't believe his cheekiness. In actual fact he was lost and when he saw foreigners in the bus he cleverly thought it would be a good idea to follow us back to the main area where all the tourists stay.
So once we got off the bus it was 10pm and we had nowhere booked to sleep and hadn't had dinner. Luckily the town was still very lively and we found a hostel pretty easily and then went to the closest cafe for food.
We've spent most of the time walking around, seeing the beautiful, old buildings. On the second night we went to the night market for food and had a really tasty chicken biryani in a clay pot and the whole bill for both of us came to less than four pounds. We went back there the final night and had the same again. The only thing I haven't liked so far are the big ass rats that we've spotted at night. They are the biggest rats ever, the size of my face... Colin says I'm over exaggerating, but he didn't get a proper look at them like me. These rats are a real problem, because I'm petrified of them and just a glimpse of one and I run for dear life, which makes Colin very nervous as a few times I've run across a busy road without looking.
One evening as we'd come in for the night there was karaoke going on in a building next to our hostel, right by our room. The lady on singing was murdering every song and seemed to be hogging the mic as we didn't hear anyone else. This carried on till at least 1am, but once we stopped laughing we managed to fall asleep.
We were hoping to go up Penang Hill, but the cable cart isn't running at the moment, so we'd have to trek up there by foot for 3 hours and then come down too and in this heat we just didn't have the energy for it.
Next we head to Kuala Lumpur.