The Blue Mansion

After what seems like an eternity, I finally get myself to post these photos that have been sitting in my hard-disk after our trip to Penang. You must think - haven't you already posted one with photos from Penang some time ago? I did. But those were all the iPhone snaps, and these are mainly photos of the famous Blue Mansion - also known as Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion. I hope it can at least show some of you how it'd be like to be staying in a mansion more than 100 years old. You can already see a lot of them in my previous post of iPhone images, here are just some additional ones taken by my camera.

A little background about the Blue Mansion - it was a stately family house of a Chinese tycoon/diplomat during the old time and has now become both a museum and a 16-room hotel in Penang. If you're not staying in the hotel, you can only visit at certain time for its guided tour - which is offered 2-3 times a day. I must say that initially it creeped me out a little imagining people walking around and staying in the very same room as we did, more 100 years ago, but it's so well maintained with its constant restoration project that it hardly feels like it's such an old mansion.

With less than 16 rooms of guests, I wasn't sure what to expect for the breakfast (I know, I'm such a foodie) They wouldn't be doing buffet with a huge variety as there aren't so many people, so I thought they might only provide some breads, toasts, jam, maybe eggs, some simple breakfast like that, but it turned out that they actually have a menu of a variety of food, we get to choose and they would cook right away, like in a restaurant. It felt really good to be having breakfast at the open air courtyard right in the middle of the 100-year-old mansion,  there was no noise of vehicles or traffic or sight of any skyscraper, I felt like I was transported to many many years back. Really peaceful.

I do realize how horrible I am in documenting my travels and trips, initially wanted to post more behind-the-scenes here, but I decided to keep this post exclusively for the Blue Mansion. Trust me, I'm really trying to keep this space alive!