Hard Rock Hotel, Penang

My mom, my brother and me had gone to Penang for eleven days during the 2019 summer holidays. We normally just stayed at our Periamma’s apartment the whole trip but this time, we decided to do something different.

My mom and her actually planned it as a surprise but I found out before we even left! Even though I knew about it beforehand, it didn’t ruin my experience there one bit.

We left on Tuesday morning and stopped by a hawker stall on the way for breakfast, where I had chicken rice (nothing compared to the Ipoh one). It wasn’t a very long drive from there, and in about half an hour, we had reached our destination.

As we drove into the hotel premises and parked the car, I gazed awestruck at the building. It was just too amazing for words! As we pulled our bags into the lobby, I was shocked yet again at the beauty of the place- and of course super exited!!! We were wearing our swimming suits inside already, so anytime we wanted to, we could just jump into the pool. However, we had just reached at the peak hour so the pool was extremely full, so Anna, Hariharan, Siddharth and me decided that we ought to sit down for a while and wait for the pool to clear up before we entered. During this time, we just talked about Fortnite, Escape park and some other random things with no specific topic.

At about 1:15, the pool started to empty up and we finally got in… and it was awesome. Most of the pool actually had sand in it, which I guess was the best part. It was so cool because it was like the sea but with freshwater and even a section that you can swim to with no sand at all (like a normal swimming pool).

At first all four of us were playing together, but soon they went off to play volleyball with some other people. I didn’t want to play volleyball yet, so I was fine with being by myself.

I took this chance to actually take a good look around the whole pool, the slides, and everything. The pool itself was pretty big, in the sandy part, there was a basketball hoop, a volleyball place and a bridge. For the non-sandy part there was a really long snake like pool which branched off at many places like a maze. Lastly, there were the 3 slides and the ‘water spraying play area’. You could actually rent a floaty but we didn’t, most likely it’s because we wanted to save money.

At the slide area, there were three choices (as I mentioned before), the purple one, the yellow one and the blue one. The purple one was my favourite of the three, and I have a good reason for my choice. It was much longer than the other two and had more twists and turns and most importantly, started at a higher place.

Eventually, though, I got tired of everything from trying it so many times and I started to get really, really, really bored. I went back to the basketball hoop hoping that the ball was free but unfortunately, the same people who had been hogging it the whole day were still there, so I was forced to find something else to do. I looked around and swam a bit here and there until suddenly a brilliant idea struck me; sand art! I just used my finger to draw pictures on it where the layer of sand was thin.

Luckily, soon after my mom came into the pool and brought in a ball too! We played catch for a while but soon she went away too, leaving me alone with the ball. I buried it in, tried to camouflage it too, but luckily, just as I was going to leave the pool and call it a day, Periamma entered and amma came back… and I knew what that meant; two ball catch!

We played for about five minutes, when the best thing happened. Anna, Hariharan, Siddharth and their two friends came to join us, and all of a sudden, I was playing with so many people, and I was so happy. So happy on the inside. Everything was going well and now I was really having fun.

One of the two new people we were playing with was a girl. I never got to know her that day. The second person was a boy from Australia called Lachlan. We just played that game until soon, the girl and Lachlan both left, and so did anna. But the people who were keeping the basket ball hoop all to themselves cleared off too, and so Siddharth, Hariharan and me could finally use it.

The sun was setting and we were playing basketball, the view was perfect, and everything was going fine… until this boy came in. He couldn’t speak English well and he wanted to play passing even though we came first and we didn’t want to. Hariharan had the ball and gave it to him straight away. I knew this wasn’t going to end well. He never passed us the ball even when it was just the four of us, and soon, he even insisted that he wanted to play monkey in the middle. The boy called all his friends, stole the ball from us, never passed it back, and just forgot we were there, even though we were the ones who gave him the ball and let him play with us.

Siddharth left to play with his friend and I went to the beach while Hariharan still tried to get included in their game. I definitely had much more fun at the beach then with them.

After about ten minutes at the beach, my mom called me back to have some fries and hot chocolate. The fries tasted normal, like the ones you could get anywhere else. The hot chocolate, on the other hand, was really warm and rich- which I really liked.

Sometime later, Hariharan came to join me at the beach. Hariharan told me about what happened after I left and he said that next time he would never give the basketball to that boy again. I agreed with him. After talking a bit more about what happened and what we should do the next time if he comes, we decided to go and play volleyball with Siddharth and my mum at the swimming pool.

We didn’t play with them for a long time, because there were a lot of small kids playing with us and they didn’t know how to shoot the ball over the net. All four of us left and went to the basketball ball hoop which was now empty and we played there for a while. Soon we got bored of playing basketball and we decided to play hide the balls, a game that I had created before. We explained the rules to Siddharth and Hariharan but my mum still didn’t want to play the game because she was afraid the ball would get lost. To try it make it easier we drew a square on the sand to mark the borders of where we would hide the balls. It went well for the first few rounds but when it was Hariharan’s turn to hide the ball everything went wrong. We found the first ball alright, but somehow, we just couldn’t find the second ball. Hariharan had told us where he had hidden the ball but we still couldn’t find the ball. We started to panic. Luckily, Hariharan had an idea to put the other ball where he had hidden it to see what could have happened to it. We observed that the ball floated up the surface instead of staying put and using that explanation we found the ball floating some distance away.

We were really scared after this incident so we decided not to play this game anymore. It was already getting really dark and they were closing the pool for the night. We decided to do a few flips into the pool before wrapping ourselves in our towels and going up to our hotel room. I was really excited to see how the room would look. Disappointingly, the room wasn’t the best I’ve seen but it was still pretty good. It had more of an old fashion look with paintings and the main reason why I didn’t really like the room was because the bathroom was really small and it didn’t have a shower, only a bath tub. But there was one thing that was really nice about the room which I had never seen in any other hotel, instead of just plain white lights there were purple lights which gave the room a really unique look.

For dinner, we ordered room service, carbonara pasta with duck. It wasn’t extraordinary. Before going to bed, we watched Bumble Bee but only a bit of Pitch Perfect. It was getting late and my mum turned off the tv. All of sudden my brother couldn’t breathe. My mom was suspicious because the entire time we were watching tv there was nothing wrong with him, but the moment the tv was switched off, everything started. My mum asked him to get a water bottle from the mini fridge in our room and propped up the pillows so he could sit down. But he was still making a lot of fuss so she decided to turn on the tv for a while and he seemed to have magically healed. He got a lot of scolding for pretending that he was seriously sick and my mom turned off the tv again. Even I knew it was all a lie. Finally, we managed to get some sleep.

*    *    *

We had to wake up early the next day, though me and my brother didn’t. I just couldn’t, because of the late night we had had the previous day. Luckily for us, Hariharan and Anna in the next room had been watching a lot of movies at night, so they couldn’t get up early too.

I got up as my mom was about to leave the room, and she told me to wake up Siddharth once I was done getting ready, change, then follow Anna and Hariharan down to the buffet breakfast. I did so, but our cousins never woke up, so we just stayed in our room, and hoped that they would wake up soon. Luckily, a few minutes later, my mom came up to the room, wondering why we took so long. I explained to her what had happened. She decided to bring us down for breakfast first.

The buffet was really good. They had a wide variety of foods, from Asian to Western delicacies. First, I had some cheese, spicy pasta, and chocolate waffles. Then I had a toasted croissant, which I thought was one of the best things that they had there. I also packed a chocolate croissant to have on the way back as today was our last day staying there. On that note, we wanted to spend our remaining time there the best we could, so we dashed to the swimming pool once again.

This time, my experience there was much better than the first day because I had many more people to play with and I even I started the day off by playing basketball with Lachlan. Siddharth, him and me were in one team, and Anna, Hariharan and another boy from Indonesia who lives in Putrajaya. Our team won, and I was really proud of myself because I scored quite many goals. Soon all of them started talking about Fortnite, a game which I don’t play. I was just playing basketball with myself, and soon they all left too. Luckily, a Chinese lady who lives in Kuala Lumpur and a boy called Keeshan who is also from KL, came to join me. After playing for a while, another boy, called Oliver who was from the UK, came to join us. Soon, they had to leave too, and Oliver went to play with Lachlan, Anna, Hariharan, and the rest… but I wasn’t alone. Two girls, Jillian and her sister, from America, came to play with me. I had quite a lot of fun.

Next, I joined the boys and another girl from Korea. Her name was Adelyn. We were playing a weird game which was something like a mix between netball and rugby. When all of a sudden, all the boys made a choo choo train. I didn’t want to join the choo choo train and so did Adelyn. She didn’t have anything to do, so I went to her and asked her what her name was. We introduced ourselves and we became friends. We were deep in conversation when one of the boys had to leave. The remaining few decided to race. Adelyn and me wanted to race with them as well, but we had something better up our sleeves. Our plan was to scare them in the middle of the race by hiding behind a wall, then going underwater and grabbing at their feet when they passed by. The plan worked and I won the race. Adelyn decided not to try to win instead she had lots of fun scaring them.

Later, Anna, Hariharan, Oliver and Lachlan were fighting and throwing the ball at each other. Me and Adelyn teamed up to get the ball and hide it from them, which we did. We later just played around, sometimes playing catch. I really had an amazing time and was sad to leave, but as the saying goes, all good things have to come to an end. We had a quick shower, got our things and hopped into the car. We had McDonalds for lunch, where I had my McChicken and fries before heading back to Periamma’s apartment. It was a really nice trip, and I would definitely  go back there again should I get the chance again.