Largest Buddhist Temple in Malaysia

Tuesday, December 18

It isn’t every day that you get to visit the largest Buddhist temple in Malaysia. I’m sure that in a different setting the various religious aspects of Buddhism and statues of the Maitreya Buddha would have had me searching through notes from University about different sects of Buddhism. But with two kids and a super hot day, most of our visit to the temple was spent keeping two girls entertained.

Throughout the temple there are numerous gift shops, all of which emphasize that their proceeds support the temple construction fund. At the first gift shop, I discovered the best 20 cents gift possible – two tiny rubber duckies. Gabi was so proud of her rubber ducky that the highlight of the entire day was the rubber ducky – which she proudly told her mother via the phone, “We buyed it. We did. We buyed a duckie and paid for it with our money.”

After a nice ride up a little train to the top of the mountain, there were lots of fun statues, including a horsey statue which the girls gleefully played on while their father stressed about them not having enough sunscreen on in the mid-day tropical sun. Rania also enjoyed looking at the water and the fishies, but most of the temple visit was traumatized by Rania wanting to go back and look at “Pooh” who was sitting with sunglasses in some gift shop.

Compliments of great grandpa Levi, we were all treated to ice cream before heading on our way. We thought that our next stop would be the cable car ride to the top of Penang Hill which has an even more commanding view of the island than the view from the temple.

Unfortunately, upon arrival we discovered that there tickets were being sold for 2:45. As it was just past noon and we were pushing our luck with naps as it was, it was an easy decision to bypass the trip up the hill. Oh well.

Finding dinner options anytime before 7 pm can be quite a challenge in Malaysia – and with little kids and hungry stomachs, we thought we would find some hole-in-the-wall place in Chinatown. As the only customers in the Foo Hueong Restaurant, we had a meal where both the girls competed for eating the most shrimp. Hole-in-the-wall was about the best description as the old lady prepared the Chinese food in a back skillet and the boss guy (the only one who spoke even a bit of English) sat in the corner playing some computer game – except when he could be roused to tell the older woman to get us more rice or another plate of shrimp.