Over the weekend we decided to head back to Ipoh. It wasn’t for any particular occasion, except for the fact that the wife is coming to the end of her maternity leave and is heading back to work. I think it’s hitting everyone quite hard, especially child number one. For the past three months, she’s had the pleasure of having mommy to herself and the sister, at home. Baby number one has taken everything with great stride, fitting into the big sister role very nicely. And for that we’re awfully proud of her.

Anyways, back to our short trip.

Normally when we head back to Ipoh, we stay over at my in-laws, but this time it would be different. As the old wedded couple, we were kicked out (I’m kidding!), and had to arrange for our own accommodation, in order to make room for the newly wedded couple. We left earlier on Friday, just so that we would have time to go around the city.

We checked in at a quaint little hotel smack in the middle of the city. Regalodge Ipoh is hidden nicely between UOB Bank, The True Jesus Church and The Tower Regency hotel. As the local that is my wife, she didn’t know of its existence, until we made that booking a week ago. The hotel was an old, refurbished hotel. The marble decorations inside made it seem new. But we could kind of tell from the dank, smokey smell as we made our way up to the room that it was anything but new. 

But as a three star hotel, it had pretty much everything that we needed. A nice comfortable bed to sleep on, and a shower with good pressure.

The best part about the place that we were staying at was that it was pretty much walking distance to everything. Not that we actually walked or anything, because with a kid and a half in tow, walking would have been quite a chore.

Having arrived at a reasonable time on Friday evening, we thought we’d check out the small touristy area at Concubine Lane, you know, just because. We’ve never really done the touristy thing here, since the wife is a local, we’ve never felt like we needed to. Just like me, a local Terengganu boy who has never visited any of the islands off of the coast.

It was kind of fun actually! Concubine Lane was indeed a narrow tourist trap, with junk to be bought, but it was an interesting area to walk around in.

Can’t walk through Concubine Lane without trying the colourful cheese toast rainbow thingo!

In all, it was quite interesting. Walking around the area, looking at how old buildings were being revived. The old-school facade was maintained, with a more modern interior. It was all quite fetching.

In any case our stay was short, I would have liked to have stuck around and walked about a bit more, but with kids in tow, and other stuff to do, it wasn’t going to happen.

But that’s okay, we’ll be back again sooner rather than later, and maybe we’ll see a bit more of this city.