Visiting Penang

We stayed for 10 days at a condominium found via VRBO. For the most part the stay was good.

Pluses:
1. Right next door to Tesco which also has a McDonalds and Pizza Hut as well as a food court among other shops inside.
2. Close to my mom's condo.
3. Great pool and not very crowded except on weekends.
4. Plenty of restaurants across the street at the e-Gate plaza: Secret Recipe, Old Town, Tao's (a Japanese restaurant), Noodle Station, Subway, a pasta and pizza place, a Vietnamese place and perhaps one or two others that I can't remember. We only ate at Old Town which serves hawker food at "upscale" prices. Starbucks is also there.

Minuses:
1. WiFi in the pool area did not work for us. We had two laptops and neither one would connect.
2. Traffic noise was loud because the building and condo was right in front of the highway.
3. Not enough pots for cooking - a toaster oven would also be nice as well as more than one trash can.
4. Having a washing machine was nice but there was no facility for drying e.g. rods to hang our wash.
5. The condo also seemed to get dirty very quickly and we vacuumed every day and mopped every other day. We had to get our own vacuum cleaner and mop so it would have been nice if these were also provided.
6. Meeting the "neighbors" and presenting ourselves to the security guards was awkward since we weren't really residents.
7. The intercom system was not activated which made it inconvenient for visitors.

In the end I'm not sure if I'd stay here again mainly because of lack of WiFi and the lack of intercom. (I'd like to minimize the interactions with the security only because they don't seem too pleased to let people in and out and we had only two fob access cards.) But the convenience of Tesco, the nice pool and being near my mom's place may trump everything in the end.

Maybe other alternatives will come up when we make our next trip home.