We last spent serious time in Ipoh more than five years ago.

A lot has happened since then:

1. People are making praiseworthy efforts at conservation. There are lots of ways to do this. You can renovate, making the old all sparkly new again. A number of hotels and shops have gone down this route, with very pleasing results. Even more striking, however, is the attempt to meld the new and the still visibly old to make something really interesting. Kong Heng Square is the spearhead of this approach, and the effect is organic, natural, and massively chic.















2. Along the same lines, a couple of interesting museums have opened up. Han Chin Pet Soo is the old Hakka Miners' Club. The building has been scrubbed up, and the tour is a fascinating glimpse into a vanished world. Yasmin at Kong Heng commemorates the life and work of Yasmin Ahmad, one of my favourite Malaysian film-makers. There are various objects from her daily life, and a one-hour rolling loop of her adverts. (My favourite quote, from a Malaysian Airlines advert: "Things can get better. We just have to stop looking up and stop looking down, and start looking forward.") Her themes are family (be grateful for them and to them), integration (accept your fellow Malaysians as just that, and stop slapping ethnic labels on them), and nostalgia (progress is great, but let's not forget the wonderful things about traditional Malaysia). Many are deliberately tear-jerking, but no less effective for that.













3. Street art has flourished. There's a series by Lithuanian artist Ernest Zacharevic, and there are whole lanes full of paintings by Eric Lai and friends. Interestingly, the themes resonate with Yasmin Ahmad's. Many of these colourful works -- which are wholly integrated with mundane external features, vegetation, and various aspects of decay -- portray scenes of community, tradition, and respect.















4. Sundays have become seriously crowded. This is the downside of all this innovation and rediscovery, I guess... Already, this blogger writes, the most famous of the "Concubine Lanes" is no longer the "hidden gem" it once was, and the recommendation is to be sure to visit the two lesser-known lanes "as they are still relatively untouched and 'original', before they become too similar to Concubine Lane". It's a conundrum, isn't it? How do you preserve without wrecking?





5. "Snow beer" has taken off. This involves terribly cold glasses and terribly cold beer. When the two are brought into contact, you get terribly cold foam. Fun for the first glass. After that, we were happy to revert to normal beer.

But there's also lots that's still the same old wonderful Ipoh:

6. The architecture is striking, the life of the traditional shops is endlessly interesting, and everywhere there are picturesque details.

7. That famous Ipoh coffee really does stand out, and we enjoyed a couple of cups in the old town.



8. The food, of course, is spectacular. The food court on the edge of Kong Heng offers fabulous dry beef kway tiao, with tender meat and a hint of ginger. The Paris Restaurant does awesome Hakka mee: "perfectly springy, flat egg noodles, topped with bean sprouts and minced meat caramelized with soy sauce and fish sauce, with an accompaniment of chilli and garlic-ginger sauce", with a side of fishballs, meatballs, and tofu floating in soup. (The uncle showed us this article, by the way!)

9. The river was particularly impressive this time round, as it was a rain-prone kind of weekend. There's a short "riverfront walk", which is lit up quite prettily at night, but seemed fairly deserted on the damp Ramadan evening we were there. Transient, but weirdly impressive, was the huge ball of water-borne debris that the river had trapped below the weir. Like a live river monster, it tumbled and writhed and clawed with its timbery limbs. By the next morning, however, the lesser flow had allowed it to disperse.



10. And the cats are ultra-picturesque...



Great weekend. And there's still lots of mileage in Ipoh and environs, so we'll definitely be back.