Ipoh 2023 - Ipoh Shops and Tea Time

After a short 2 hours or so ride, we arrived at Ipoh with gloomy clouds. Same as Penang, Ipoh has beautiful colonial buildings that are in need of some maintenance. I hope things look better when I visit it in one week's time, so that when I blog about it again, I have more positive report to document!

 

This is the first time my husband is visiting Ipoh! (not counting the time the bus we took from Singapore to Penang where the engine overheated and we ended up in front of the Ipoh Police Station somewhere.....). So we took the heritage trail route and walked ourselves to our hotel. We were staying at Cititel Express Ipoh. We also booked the same hotel for our 2025 trip since it is in a convenient location. Basically I hate paying for taxi rides no matter where I am. For this trip of 4 days 3 night, I planned for us to spend 1 day cave temple exploring, and 1 day museum exploring. 

The rain did pour down in the afternoon, which made the often crowded alley of Concubine Lane almost empty. Rainy day sights were also quite calming and pretty, although pretty wet. Luckily the rain did not last long. 

I took my husband to wander around the old town. It isn't hard to explore everything on foot. I love looking at the old shops and houses. It's colours are always so contrasting. Old town Ipoh area is also pretty Chinese, although Little India is also around the area.

There are just so much Chinese wordings on the shops and houses. Everything looked so retro it's almost charming.

For some reason, I've never walked inside the Ipoh Park or Kinta River area before. They always looked so worn out, empty, or with some weird people inside. Perhaps I can try venturing into them on my upcoming trip since I will be having two men with me? 

Since we had a lot of time, we went in to some of the shops to take a look around. 

I also love these retro but new blinds you can find in Ipoh. These are becoming quite rare in Penang  now. You can see old dusty ones in Taiping, but here in Ipoh, they all looked so new and pretty. Every one is unique, and retro. Love them. 

There were a lot of traditional shops around along some of the deserted streets on this rainy afternoon. Since there weren't much to do, we went in to explore. Above is a dry good store that sells dry seafood and chinese cooking stuff. They looked pretty alien to me too! But my husband was pretty at home with the ingredients here. He bought some preserved vegetables that is used in some Hakka dishes.

They also sold a lot of pork products, as do most chinese shops......

A lot of fermented stuff too, mainly fermented soya beans and bean curd. I don't really like these, but I do like Japanase and Korean version of the same things (miso and gochuchang, samyang etc). I felt pretty much like a traitor here cause I didn't know how to cook with these chinese version of seasoning, but felt pretty at home with the Japanese and Korean version.

I don't know what are these. I took a photo of it cause they looked so gross! Hahaha. Fish? Lizard? Bats?

With nothing much to do on our first day, we went to have our tea at Nam Heong Kopitiam. The classic thing to order here is egg tart and white coffee. I'm pretty sure there are other things on the menu as well, but these two were my go-to tea time snack here. Basically, just order white coffee anywhere in Ipoh and it will probably been good.

I mean, look at that! Just by looking at the photo makes me drool. I can't wait to go back!